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A wall of nametags at a South Korean park testifies to adoptees’ longing for their birth mothers
More than 900 ceramic tags and 1,000 profile pages offer adoptees a public place to search for relatives and confront decades of separation.
- Dozens of Korean adoptees from North America and Europe recently gathered at Omma Poom Park in Paju, South Korea, to place more than 900 ceramic nametags on a cobblestone wall. The monument, meaning "mother's embrace," honors the global diaspora of separated children.
- During the 1980s, Seoul's former military dictatorship incentivized adoptions to reduce the population, sending more than 6,600 children to the West annually. Authorities often mislabeled children as abandoned orphans, facilitating rapid placements while ignoring rampant fraud.
- Adoptees like Nicole Rieth, adopted to Michigan when 4 months old in January 1989, and Angela Lee-Pack, who grew up in Ontario, are now searching for birth families. Lee-Pack cites severe abuse in her adoptive home; Rieth seeks to understand her heritage.
- Birth mothers recently asked South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate alleged illegal adoptions, joining hundreds of fraud claims filed by adoptees. Omma Poom houses a museum storing some 1,000 profile pages with photos and messages from adoptees searching for mothers.
- Paju-Based photographer Lee Yong-nam says the pain of separation is now surfacing among younger generations of adoptees. Many continue exhausting every effort to find birth families, hoping to resolve decades of uncertainty about their origins.
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Associated Press News+19 Reposted by 19 other sources
A wall of nametags at a South Korean park testifies to adoptees’ longing for their birth mothers
Dozens of people adopted abroad fastened ceramic nametags recently on a cobblestone wall at a park on a former U.S. military base in Paju, South Korea.
·New York, United States
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A Wall of Nametags at a South Korean Park Testifies to ...
·Washington, United States
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Total News Sources22
Leaning Left9Leaning Right3Center7Last UpdatedBias Distribution47% Left
Bias Distribution
- 47% of the sources lean Left
47% Left
L 47%
C 37%
R 16%
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