I was adopted to the Faroe Islands when I was 1 year, 10 months old. I grew up with very supportive parents, a grandmother, sister, and our family dog, in a small city of about 6 thousand inhabitants. The Faroe Islands, as a whole, is a small country of about 52,000 people and has a small island-like culture where people all know each other. In my town, there were about 12 other adoptees – some older, some younger.
Life was generally easy in my hometown and my new family has always been very encouraging and supportive of whatever I wanted to do. After completing school in the Faroe Islands, I moved to Denmark to study at university. My first time traveling back to Korea was in 2015.
Growing up, I never identified myself with being Korean at all. Partly because knowledge of Korea or Korean culture wasn’t very prevalent back then. I had never met anyone who was from or had even visited Korea, so I knew very little about the country of my origin. For whatever reason I was put up for adoption, I always assumed it was because my Korean parents wanted to give me a better life than they could offer themselves in Korea. It didn’t matter to me whether I understood their decision or not because I was sure that they made the decision with good intentions. I never imagined that I would go back and search for them, out of respect for their decision to send me for adoption. I don’t remember that these topics were ever discussed amongst the other adoptees around me growing up.
In 2015, I was traveling in Germany with a friend and towards the end of the trip, I started searching for my next travel destination. It was then that my friend suggested, “you’ve been traveling all over the world, why haven’t you been to Korea?”. I thought to myself, sure, I could go. But I always had this thought that when I do eventually go, I wouldn’t travel casually like I normally do. Instead, I would take the time to plan more extensively. Perhaps I could write a blog, or make a documentary. For fun, I texted my sister and asked if she wanted to join. I was sure she was going to say no, but surprisingly she agreed.
We didn’t do any research before coming to Korea. My sister had been very busy with work and I had been busy traveling. All we knew was that we wanted to go sightseeing. It was then that my sister suggested that we should visit the adoption agency that we both were adopted through. We arranged a meeting with the agency but we had no idea what to expect.
When we met the social worker, she told me that my mother was looking for me in 2004 and asked if I wanted to let her know that I was in Korea. I didn’t want to make a decision at that point because I had to go back to the Faroe Islands since my vacation was ending. My sister was only here for 10 days, and I was about to start a new job. I felt that, in time, if I wanted to, I could maybe start a dialogue with her. But there must have been some misunderstanding because suddenly my mother started emailing me. I spoke with the adoption agency and they said that they had given her my email address.
By the time my mother started emailing me, my sister had already returned to the Faroe Islands. I remember thinking, this woman is very emotional and I’m not sure if she’s even sane because she was emailing me every hour on the hour. And I don’t think she actually was at that point. This went on for a week. I remember feeling very frustrated about the situation. Not knowing what to do, or how to act. It felt like it was expected of me to meet her, but I didn’t really want to at the time.
I also remember feeling conflicted, anxious even. I kept thinking, what kind of person am I if I meet my mother and I don’t want to see her again. Or what if we really clicked, then what? I was really happy with my life, and I assumed that if I met my mother, my life would change a lot. And I wasn’t sure if it was going to be something I was going to be happy about or not. I knew that it was going to change, and I was wondering if I was ready for that change since I had already made plans to start a new job in the Faroe Islands and buy a house, those types of things.
Then my mother in the Faroe Islands was like, “I’m a mother myself and I can imagine how she must feel. You should at least reply and hear what she wants to say because she’s obviously in pain.” So I decided to start a dialog with her. It was all very confusing, since I had people translating for me, and she kept talking about a sister. Some thought she was saying that I had a (different) sister and others thought she was talking about her sister. But it was obvious that she wanted to meet, so through the adoption agency, we agreed to meet about a week after I had visited the adoption agency. Later I found out that her sister, who lives in the USA, was in Korea at the time too. My aunt speaks English and my mother wanted us to meet while she still was in Korea so she could translate for us.
I had never imagined I was going meet my Korean family, so before I went to meet my mother I remembered googling: ‘questions to ask your biological mother’, and I wrote some of the questions down on a piece of paper and brought the paper with me to the adoption agency where we had agreed to meet. But when I met her I don’t even think I used many of the questions. My mother was very emotional when we finally met, crying a lot, so I was trying to comfort her. As I can recall, the social worker asked some standard questions like about our family history of illness.
After the initial reunion, we went into another room where my aunts were waiting. I got to meet them on the same day as well. I remember they were touching me all the time, the three of them were like surrounding me and just touching me and I was thinking to myself, this is a lot, and I think the social worker thought so as well, so she suggested for us to sit down, but they were still over the table touching me. It was a more joyful moment, compared to the emotional meeting we had just had. After meeting, we all went out to eat. When we finished eating, they convinced me to come with them straight to Anyang, where one of my aunts lives. My Korean family is very forceful.
I like my family a lot and now we get along very well — we understand each other better now. When we first met, the cultural differences were obviously huge. At times I didn’t understand what was going on and I didn’t always understand their decisions. But I could feel that they had unconditional love for me and how much it meant for my mother to have met me, as it has had a huge influence on her life.
After I met my Korean family, I decided to stay in Korea for one more month. I found out that my father died in a car accident when I was a year old. I was able to meet my relatives through his side of the family, but by this point, my mother’s family was more than I could handle, so I didn’t meet his family again during this initial visit to Korea. It was a very overwhelming experience because my mother acted as if she was afraid of losing me again, so it was very nice to go back to the Faroe Islands and get a bit of distance. Even after going back to the Faroe Islands, we still kept in contact. It was usually just some pictures or emojis, but as time went on, it became less frequent. Two years later, in 2017, I came back with my sister. It was her first time meeting them. It was a really big thing for her as well because she doesn’t have any information about her parents, so she enjoyed it a lot to spend time with my Korean family. Two years after the initial reunion, everyone was more chill or relaxed about the situation, so we could enjoy each other’s company more rather than anxiously observe each other all the time. We were there for almost 3 weeks and stayed at my mother’s place most of the time. Sometimes we went to Seoul on the weekends, or stayed in Anyang with my aunts and traveled around.
I returned to Korea alone in October 2019 and really enjoyed life in Seoul. I felt like it would be a nice change for a year or so, to relocate and get to know my Korean family better. That’s when I was like, maybe I should ask for a year’s leave of absence from work and live in Seoul for a year or so. So when I went back home, I did just that and relocated to Seoul in April of 2020.
Now I’m studying Korean, and while the communication with my family is still challenging, I can communicate a few basic sentences which makes it feel like we understand each other much better now.
Coming to Korea has changed the perceptions of myself in a more conscious way. Also talking with other adoptees about their experiences has been very enlightening and has also helped me better understand Korean culture, my family, and myself. I’m really happy about my decision to come to Korea. Maybe I should have done it earlier in life, but I am happy I did it when I did. When I think back, in the beginning, I could have been better at explicitly stating my boundaries. I spent a lot of time and energy thinking about how my family felt and what they wanted, instead of focusing on what I felt or needed. I’m still not good at that, but I am getting better at it.
