How Much Does Finding My Family Cost?

By Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Ph.D.

The upstairs file rooms at Eastern Social Welfare Society, the agency that facilitated my overseas adoption to the United States, contain the records of adoptees stored in rolling bookcases to maximize space. Cranking one bookcase open reveals rows and rows of manila folders numbered in order of processing.
A folder is a life. A life is a folder.

What is inside each folder is a mystery to many adoptees who request copies of their files but are denied or who receive partial contents or blacked out documents. Some adoptees are told that their files have been lost to fires, while others are shown their files but are not allowed to copy, photograph, or touch them.
Because the files are the adoption agencies' private property, they lack governmental oversight determining how much information the agencies are required to share or are restricted from sharing.

The result is a cottage industry of post-adoption services facilitating family meetings. Yet what price does finding family cost?

Adoptees begin searching from where they're located, and that means outside of Korea. Overseas adoption agency fees range anywhere from 29,400 won just for copying an adoption file (Holt Adoption Services) to 88,190 won per hour to talk on the phone with family (Dillon Adoption Agency).

These fees add up. For example, Dillon Adoption Agency, which brokered my adoption, charges 94,090 won just for responding to an adoptee's intitial request to search. A visit to Dillon's website reveals that a completed search costs 735,100 won should it prove successful.
This figure does not include 29,400/page for translating Korean documents into English, or 17,600 won/page for English to Korean. Furthermore, this amount does not include the cost of airfare, lodging, food, and translation should an adoptee attempt to find out more information in Korea or actually meet family in person.

I have yet to find my family, but I have looked for them every summer since 2007. I estimate that I have spent at least 6,470,000 won, and this is a conservative amount, which lacks food costs, transportation in Korea, overseas medical insurance, and incidental expenses.
The Ministry reports that 75,646 adoptees (almost half of the entire government documented overseas adoptee population) sought counseling for birth family search between 1995-2005. Only 2.7 percent successfully reunited with family.

I am one of the 97.3 percent still waiting.

How much did losing my family cost?

When my adoptive mother gave me my English-language documents in 1996, I found stuffed inside an envelope a receipt for my adoption fee. In 1976, losing my family cost 529,000 won.
In 1976, 6,597 babies were sent overseas to 14 receiving nations in Europe and North America. In terms of cost (529,000 won), that's 3,490,000,000 won or 13,270,114,000 won(adjusted for inflation) in 2009.

My loss and the loss of other overseas adoptees is whose gain? No study as of yet has been conducted to answer this question, but it's an urgent one that will clarify intercountry adoption as a global industry.

Adoption is oftentimes characterized as a loving decision. Though this might be the intention, adoption is still a business.

As an infant, I was an exported product for which my adoptive parents paid 529,000. In the context of post-adoption services, I am the customer who returned again and again and spent at least 6,470,000 won for nothing.

What could at least 6,470,000 won help my family and I gain together? This money could pay for a semester at university to help me speak Korean so that my family and I can laugh together. It could purchase a year's worth of food for us.

According to another global company, McDonald's, the customer is always right, but I am not a customer. I'm somebody's daughter, sister, and niece. I don't care about the money. After all, what price can one place on love?

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs is assistant professor at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, U.S. and the author of Paper Pavilion (White Pine Press 2007).

> Earlier Korean Version was published in the Pressian <