My name is Ki Sun.
I also go by Priscilla.
I'm a journalist and a proud Korean Canadian.
Yet lately I've been digging into a deep, dark
period of our past.
In the decades after the Korean War, widespread poverty and social pressures
paved the way for countless babies to be sent for adoption.
Every baby in this room has been abandoned.
500 children a month are exported for adoption with government approval.
South Korea is seen to have a surplus of babies and demand
was high from Western countries.
Many ended up with well-intentioned families
around the world, including here in Canada.
CBC News cameras were there in 1968
when the first Korean adoptees arrived in Toronto to much fanfare.
Today, those toddlers are now grown adults,
many naturally curious about their lineage.
But what they're beginning to find
is that every little clue about their origins may have been a lie.
My name is Randa-Rae Tyndale.
I'm a Korean-Canadian adoptee.
My name is Michael Thielmann.
My name is Evelyn Forrester
Angela Lee-Pack.
Jenny Heijun Wills.
Karl Johnson.
Jennifer Duffy.
Sun Ah Brock.
I'm a Canadian-Korean adoptee.
And I want the truth.
I want the truth.
And I want the truth.
My name is Kelly Foston and I want the truth.
I got to grow up in this.
I just shake my head and go, Wow.
I feel like I had a good upbringing.
I felt like one of the family.
All my kids were taken care of.
Did camping, did trips to Disneyland.
Happy childhood.
[Reporter] Kelly Foston was born Yoon Soo Jun.
She was adopted at the age of four by a family in White Rock, B.C..
I grew up eating potatoes and pasta and everything was Western
and I didn't know anything different because I couldn't remember
anything about Korea.
[Reporter] Details in the original paperwork
she arrived with were scarce.
Father: Unknown.
Mother: No record.
This paperwork was what my parents knew.
They didn't know much more.
[Reporter] Based on what was written
Kelly grew up believing she was an orphan and that both her parents had died.
And it wasn't until recently that Kelly wanted to see
if she had any family members in her birth country.
If I don't search now,
I may
never know what it feels like to have a blood relative.
This is.
This is who I am.
This is where I come from.
[Reporter] Despite knowing little about her past, Kelly holds on to her Korean documents
Kelly holds on to her Korean documents so dearly.
She asks if I could help her translate them.
To try to find any clues.
I want to talk to you about two words in Korean
Gi-A versus Go-A
Gi-A literally means abandoned child in Korean
Go-A literally means an orphan.
But I noticed a shift
and I want to show you this document.
This is the first time that you are officially a Go-A
An orphan on paper.
[Reporter] How could Kelly be both an orphan and an abandoned child?
Who exactly abandoned her?
- Took 49 years for you to get this paperwork. - Yeah.
A new document she received this spring out of the blue
added to the complexity, the adoption agency told her
they had found her birth father in Korea, meaning her original papers
that said “Father: no record” were false.
As a adoptee trying
to learn about my origins, that's a big deal.
People
played God.
Thank you so much for doing this
because without that, I needed a Korean that I trusted.
[Reporter] Kelly’s story is not unique.
We spent months speaking to dozens of Korean adoptees.
Some had more clues than others about their birth parents.
Regardless, every single adoptee arrived with an orphan certificate,
officially cutting them off from any family
in South Korea.
My name is
Kim Alexander McKay, but my Korean name is Kim Jung Soo.
I was adopted in 1975.
Straight from Korea to East Vancouver.
And you had your original Korean documents.
What did they say about you?
Well, I was left by my family.
Yeah, I was abandoned on the street.
[Reporter] Kim McKay grew up feeling alone in the world.
Why had his parents abandoned him?
He lived half his life, heartbroken.
For a while, he didn't even know he was Korean.
One day, by a miraculous fluke,
his birthmother was able to track him down.
Once the DNA test came back, it was like I looked at my wife and my
two young children. I was like, we're going to Korea.
They open the door and this woman walks in.
She's pretty much knocked my kids to the side and grabbed me.
And she started screaming and and crying.
And, you know, it was like that piece of me that was missing.
[Reporter] After he met his mom, she told him the true story behind his adoption.
[Kim] My parents divorced and my grandmother decided to put me up for adoption.
[Reporter] Kim shares his paperwork with me as well.
And right there, it says, you know, you were just found.
Yeah, They said that I was abandoned on the street and
and now I know that that wasn't true either.
My grandmother dropped me off, and my poor mom, she had no clue.
[Reporter] Kim says he's simply lucky
having a blood bond, an ocean away means the world to him.
But he doesn't speak Korean.
His mom doesn't speak English, meaning he can't just casually call her to chat.
So I help him.
[in Korean] Hello?
[in Korean] Mom.
Oh. Oh.
I want to introduce you to my friend Priscilla
[in Korean] Hello.
[in Korean] my name is Hwang Ki Sun
I’m a reporter who works for a broadcaster in Canada.
She says I love you.
I love you, Mommy.
[in Korean] Love you, mommy
[Kim] It's funny because I
was 49 years old, no longer an orphan.
I actually belong to a family now.
[Reporter] Kim's mother spent 30 years wondering
if her son was dead or alive and where he could be in the world.
We managed to connect with her in Seoul.
Suh Dong Rim
talks about having her son taken away from her against
her will simply because she was divorced.
[in Korean] I was stunned
I was just shocked.
I couldn’t eat for weeks.
Since then, no one in our family has talked about Jung Soo, like an unwritten law.
I miss you.
I love you.
[Reporter] The pain of what happened is still so raw.
South Korean society is grappling
with the painful truth of its adoption history.
Children shuffled out overseas to avoid shame.
Adoption agencies cashing in.
All of it signed off by the South Korean authorities.
Lee Kyung-eun
is a former director of Amnesty International Korea
who now heads up Human rights Beyond Borders.
I would say that the relevant authorities of South Korean government
worked as a factory
of mass production of orphan documents.
[Reporter] She's calling out the deceptive tactics
by both adoption agencies and government authorities.
The orphaned documents were produced and issued by government authorities,
but I can find no evidence that each individual case
was really assessed and investigated by those authorities
to figure out that those children were really orphaned or not.
This orphan making procedure was totally illegal.
That was really a big tragedy in the history of this country.
[Reporter] But what about Canada?
There are clues in this faded photo
of a baby who was kidnaped in South Korea.
The toddler was adopted into Canada and raised by a B.C.
family.
That case
prompted us to dig through decades of once classified material
on international adoptions at the National Archives in Ottawa.
There were calls for a full scale investigation into all Korean adoptions,
but we couldn't find records of any such action.
We came across old letters and telegrams raising alarm bells.
Some calling the kidnaping case a predicament.
A serious complication.
Hi, Dad.
How's it going?
Really good.
[Reporter] So adoptions of so-called Korean orphans kept happening,
which allowed for people like Kelly Foston to arrive on our shores
four years after that kidnaping case.
You've only scratched the surface of this.
- Are you finding it overwhelming? - Very much so.
[Reporter] It appears federal officials never directly cautioned Canadians,
including Kelly's adoptive father, Jim Foston.
[Jim] If I had have had the opportunity --
[Reporter] He's now learning from his daughter that the
adoption papers that were handed to him decades ago were very misleading.
My first impression when I heard this, what was that is that it was like
human trafficking?
Are we talking about human trafficking?
I was with the RCMP.
I had a top-secret security clearance.
I wasn't going to do anything illegal that was going to jeopardize that.
It just wouldn't have happened.
But I would have been pissed off.
Would have changed anything?
No, when I think of all the memories that we have
of her growing up from the time she arrived until going through school
all her -- not a snowball's chance in hell.
Because look what we've got.
We got Kelly, didn't we?
[Kelly] I can't even express it in words.
[Reporter] For Kelly, the bombshell discovery
that she has a birth father who may still be alive
brings her more anger when it should bring her joy.
[Kelly] I want the Canadian government to investigate.
I want them to figure out and look into the cases.
How could Canada have gone into agreements?
Did they know about this?
Kelly longs for a relationship with her birth parents,
whose whereabouts the Korean adoption agency appears to know
but refuses to share, citing privacy reasons.
[Kelly] This has sent with all my love in hopes
you find the strength to move forward with me.
[Reporter] Kelly decides to write a letter to her birth father.
It's all she can do for now.
I want to share with you that I've had a good life.
I've been raised to be healthy, strong and independent.
Would you please send a letter to me?
Sincerely, Kelly Foston.
Yoon Soo Jun.