South Korean Mother Finds Long-Lost Daughter After 44 Years

A South Korean mother has been reunited with her long-lost daughter, 44 years after they were both separated. In May 1975, Han Tae-soon had gone to the market when she left her six-year-old daughter Kyung-ha playing near their home in Seoul. When Ms Han returned, her daughter had vanished.

For more than four decades, Ms Han tried desperately to find her daughter but to no avail. Just when all hope seemed lost, a breakthrough came in 2019 when a DNA match through 325 Kamra, a group that connects overseas Korean adoptees with their birth parents by matching the DNA, alerted about a match.

Ms Han was matched with Laurie Bender, a nurse in California. After several phone calls to ascertain the identity, Ms Bender flew over to Seoul, where the two had a cathartic and tearful reunion.

"I've been a hairdresser for 30 years. I can quickly tell if it's my daughter just by feeling her hair. I had mistakenly thought I found her before, so I had to touch and feel the hair to confirm it," Ms Han told the BBC.

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Eventually, they both pieced together the events that led to the painful separation. As per Ms Kyung, she was approached by a strange woman who took her away to the railway station, claiming that her mother did not need her any more.

After the train ride, Ms Kyung was picked up by police officers and placed in an orphanage. Soon, she was flown to the US, where she was adopted by a couple in Virginia.

Ms Han is now suing the South Korean government, accusing it of failing to prevent her daughter's forced separation and illegal adoption. Her lawsuit is the first of its kind that aims to challenge South Korea's decades-long overseas adoption programme.

"I spent 44 years ruining my body and mind searching for [my daughter]. But in all that time, has anyone ever apologised to me? No one. Not once," said Ms Han.

Earlier this year, a landmark inquiry found that successive South Korean governments had committed human rights violations by allowing private agencies to "mass export" children for profit on an industrial scale.