A sister I never knew upended my understanding of myself, my birth family and my Korean heritage.

By Darragh Hannan

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I was adopted from South Korea when I was eight weeks old. The story I knew was that my birth mother, who came from a well-to-do family, was 21 when I was born, had to drop out of school to have me, and gave me up so I could have a better life.

I grew up in South Bend going to movies at University Park Mall and eating pizza at Barnaby’s. I’m fortunate that during my Midwestern upbringing, I was free to explore Korean culture as I wanted. I’ve learned that many Korean adoptees are discouraged or outright blocked from learning about their heritage. But me? I felt Korean.

In 2018, I saw a promotion for a free DNA test for adoptees from an international company called MyHeritage. I wrote a short essay and got a free test. The results were what I expected — many “relatives” who were no closer than fifth cousins. I assumed the company didn’t have a strong East Asia database.

It was odd to think I had a physical connection to those people, however remote. Normally I think of myself as appearing on the scene at eight weeks old, like a flower popping out of the ground fully formed. But those relations were too distant to bring me closer to my Korean origins.

My connections among the Korean American community in America were equally slight — and sometimes embarrassing. Living in the Washington, D.C., area after college, I once went to an Asian grocery store called H Mart. I felt overwhelmed by the number of products I didn’t recognize. When a little old lady tried to speak to me in Korean, I said I only spoke English and she turned away in shame.

I buried what could have been a spectacular identity crisis and moved on with my life.

After moving to Philadelphia, I took better advantage of the abundant opportunities in the city’s large Korean community, attempting language classes, attending cultural and historical events. I found the Korean neighborhood with the only bakery in town that makes mammoth bread — a delicious pastry with sweet cream, red bean paste and a peanut crumble.

By 2024, I was involved in the Korean Adoptee Association of Philadelphia. We meet regularly to eat Korean food and commiserate about never really belonging in any one community — a type of belonging in not belonging. I could walk into an H Mart and buy at least four items with confidence. And I found a Korean Catholic parish where the church ladies make sure my plate has three layers of food at every potluck, as if force-feeding me kimchi will make up for lost time.

In May 2024, I received an email through MyHeritage. The message read, “Hi, apparently we’re sisters. While I’m still a bit in shock, I’m happy to get to know you! Are you willing too? Kind regards, JeeWon Olyslager.”

Record scratch. Freeze frame. What?

It had been so long that I had to reset my MyHeritage password, but once I was in, I went to her profile. According to the metrics, JeeWon and I were full sisters, meaning we have the same biological mother and father. This was crazy.

JeeWon is 15 months older than me, which threw into question everything I thought I knew about my origins. That meant our birth mother was 19 when JeeWon was born and got pregnant again a mere six months later by the same guy. Clearly not impossible, but certainly not common.

It was a jarring revelation to discover someone out there with nearly 50 percent of my DNA, a shared ancestral history, a physical connection to my existence. That meant I wasn’t some sort of cosmic anomaly, that I hadn’t just popped out of the ground like a daisy.

JeeWon and I spent summer 2024 getting to know each other. It was fascinating to see nature versus nurture in action: We both make the same face when we don’t want to do something, we hold mugs the same way, we both have bad varicose veins in our right legs. JeeWon’s daughter, Nahla, says our nostrils are the same shape.

We have a similar sense of humor (bad and dark) and style (neon clothes and bright nail polish). I’ve been knitting since I was 9; JeeWon owns her own knitting and sewing shop. We are both networkers — we bring people together and encourage them to the finish line.

It was fun video-calling her all summer and sharing different parts of our lives: her daughter’s sporting tournaments, what outfit I should wear to an event, the general untidiness of life.

But our backgrounds are very different.

When JeeWon was born in 1985, she was adopted by a Korean couple, the Ha family. This is unusual. Koreans traditionally don’t raise children who aren’t related to them, because they have a thing about blood purity that would make Voldemort proud. No paperwork is known to exist from this adoption, but the couple did legally register JeeWon in the family ledger.

After two years, the Has divorced and put JeeWon up for adoption again. This time she was adopted by a Belgian couple who, by all accounts, treated their large family in horrific fashion.

This family had 10 children, all adopted. Three were from South Korea, including JeeWon. Seven came from Cambodia. It was recently revealed that the father, who died in 1996, ran a child trafficking ring and brought at least 25 Cambodian children to Belgium. It is unclear if this number includes JeeWon’s adoptive siblings. Their papers are full of inconsistencies, and they would need a skilled lawyer to untangle the mess.

The home was also full of physical and emotional abuse. I’m told that the mother would lock the kids in the bathroom for hours without food when she had to leave the house. JeeWon told me about hiding food in her bed to make sure she would have something to eat. According to one story, JeeWon was once late to school and decided to ride her bike because it was faster than walking. But her adoptive mother had told her not to ride her bike. The woman got in the family van, chased JeeWon down an alley, clipped her with the van door so she would fall into a ditch, took the bike and drove away, leaving JeeWon bleeding and late for school.

How does one respond to that? I can’t begin to express how horrified I am at what my sister had to endure.

JeeWon ran away from home at 14 and figured life out from there. I wish I had known her then — our South Bend home was small, but we’d have had room for her.

She and I soon decided we had to meet in person and that it would happen in South Korea, the place with the most shared meaning. It would be the first time either of us had returned to the country of our birth.

The trip proved to be an odyssey of discovery and bureaucracy, a personal journey tangled up in an active national reckoning over South Korea’s dark adoption legacy. It would unite us for the first time and estrange us once again.

My goals for the trip were to get to know my sister and otherwise have an American tourist experience — eat good food, visit interesting museums. I did not see it as a homecoming. For good or ill, my American upbringing has had the most direct impact on who I am today.

JeeWon needed more. The quest to find our birth mother — a borderline-impossible task given the tangle of red tape and the Korean culture of silence around adoption — represented more than just a piece in the puzzle of her personal history. It represented a sense of belonging, home and family that she never had.

In South Korea, the subject of adoption is fraught. Since the end of the Korean War in 1953, The New York Times has reported, an estimated 200,000 Korean children have been adopted abroad, the highest number of any country in the world. Some children, like me, were lucky to go to loving homes. Others, like my sister, suffered abuse and neglect.

Adoptees have challenged South Korea for years to confront this legacy, an effort chronicled in a September 2024 Frontline documentary that included accounts of babies stolen from hospitals and front yards to be sold abroad, and parents blatantly lied to about their children’s fates.

In March 2025, the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission acknowledged for the first time that children had been sent away “like luggage.” Agencies profiting from the practice, the commission found, had engaged in nefarious and criminal tactics.

On the other side of the equation, demand for Korean children was high. This was especially true in the United States after the National Association of Black Social Workers called for an end to the adoption of Black children by white families in 1972. They thought Black children were less likely to thrive when raised outside of their culture. White parents then turned to South Korea, as the country had already created a framework for the adoption of children orphaned by the war.

Years ago, I had wondered if I was one of those stolen babies. The only way to know for sure would be to locate my birth mother and ask. But now I believe that the fact that she left conflicting information — and that I have a full sister who never lived in the same place I did — suggests we were given up voluntarily by a woman who doesn’t want to be found.

Most Korean adoptees were funneled through four agencies — we identify ourselves by agency like Hogwarts houses. In August 2024, I contacted my agency, now known as Korea Welfare Services, which sent me a copy of my adoption papers. KWS registered my search with the National Center for the Rights of the Child, the only organization in South Korea authorized to conduct birth-family searches. I also purchased a membership to the Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link, or GOAL, a Seoul-based organization that assists adoptees with the process.

Another major aspect of our plans involved media coverage. Our differing priorities about that became an ongoing source of tension between JeeWon and me.

About six years ago, another pair of sisters was reunited through MyHeritage — Christine Pennell from Connecticut and Kim Haelen of Belgium. The company produced a documentary about their story. Kim and JeeWon know each other through the Belgian network of Korean adoptees. We considered the story of those sisters a template for how to understand ours.

We decided not to do a documentary but agreed to news cameras and interviews when we met. I think I was hoping to have good footage of our first meeting, but I hadn’t really thought about publicity beyond that.

I arrived in Seoul one October day at 3 p.m., six hours after JeeWon. I stopped in the bathroom to change because I knew the cameras were waiting, and I’m vain enough not to want to look like an airplane slug. Coming through the doors from customs, I saw JeeWon among the cameras and ran to her.

A Korea Herald clip of the moment went viral. For me, it was a blur. After 24 hours in transit, I was fried, and we both felt we couldn’t speak freely because of the microphones.

The next 14 days were packed. We met many adoptees from around the world, a lot of whom had returned to live in Seoul. Visits to tourist sites and shopping were part of the itinerary, too, but the search for our birth mother dominated our time.

Because JeeWon’s papers go back to the Ha family, and mine go back to our shared birth mother, strict South Korean privacy laws meant I had to lead the search. Even though JeeWon could prove we are biological sisters, she would be prohibited from using my information to find our mother.

As I had anticipated, my adoption agency could offer no new information. Neither the agency nor the government has a record of anyone existing with the national ID number, birth date and address my biological mother provided when I was born. If she had moved out of the country, there would be a record of her acquiring a new form of identification — like a green card or a social security number. If she had died, there would be a record of that, although Korean law would prevent me from knowing cause of death, site of burial or next of kin.

Only after the National Center for the Rights of the Child proved that my biological parents could not be found was I eligible for a certificate of adoption. The certificate allowed me to leave my DNA at a police station. This process took a long time — I had registered my search several months prior to the trip and was somewhat apprehensive that even that would suffice for the center to conduct a thorough search.

JeeWon’s circumstances were more complicated. She tried to register her search with her agency, Holt International, which had a backlog of queries from adoptees after the Frontline report raised widespread concerns about its practices. Holt had processed more adoptions than any other agency. But JeeWon could not receive a certificate of adoption without proof that the Ha family couldn’t be located, which Holt said it wouldn’t get to for months.

We visited my agency about five days into the trip. A KWS representative did conduct an impromptu review of files on JeeWon’s phone and confirmed that, legally, she had been part of the Ha family, but whether she was still considered a family member was uncertain. The couple might have removed her from the registry when they divorced. The process for getting a conclusive answer to such questions in South Korea is convoluted and time-consuming. JeeWon learned she would get this answer faster if she went to the South Korean embassy in Belgium, but this advice was as much help as my agency could provide.

This situation was a huge point of tension between us, a recipe for disaster. I think JeeWon had expected to meet our birth mother on the trip. Our limited time in South Korea — and every new roadblock — increased the urgency of finding her.

Another trait JeeWon and I share is a need to control outcomes. But in this case, we had very different views of what the outcome should be and how to achieve it — all the way down to bickering about the train station where we should switch lines.

After our meeting at my adoption agency, we went to a bakery in Seoul called Suga Mama, run by Christine Pennell, one of the women reunited with her sister through MyHeritage. Pennell moved to Seoul several years ago to look for her birth mother, and she functions as a den mother and hub for adoptees. It was nice to let off steam with someone who has similar life experience — and to eat comforting American baked goods made from scratch.

We left Suga Mama and met a GOAL representative, YeoKyung Wie, who took us to the nearby Jongno metropolitan police station so I could leave a sample of my DNA. It was clear Wie was familiar with this process. We were escorted to a room where a police officer explained what was happening in a very disengaged way as he swabbed my mouth. Wie tried to get him to take JeeWon’s DNA as well, but he would not do so without an adoption certificate.

I was struck by how routine this transaction was for the police officer. The room had a drawer full of forms created specifically for receiving adoptees’ DNA. I was just one of myriad people leaving genetic information at this one Seoul police station in the slim hope of a match.

One recurring theme of our trip was fighting about the media, which was probably an outlet for the clash of our differing paths. I was caught unprepared when our story went viral — including articles in The Independent, a major British daily, and in People magazine — and I felt uncomfortable with the publicity.

I balked at seeking further coverage. JeeWon saw this as my obstructing her search for her birth mother and her own identity. In her view, the more attention we got, the more likely we were to find our birth mother. Such an approach is not unusual for adoptees, whom agencies often encourage to go to the Korean press, to post on social media, to hang up fliers with baby pictures and birth stats and the last known whereabouts of their biological mothers.

One night over makgeolli, a fermented rice drink that is lightly sweet and fizzy, our conflict over the media spilled over. We were visiting with Pennell and other adoptees who were further along in their journeys than we were. I am grateful they had the experience to help us try to make sense of the chaos and tension. I thought we had worked things out and was surprised, months later, when that turned out not to be true.

At the time, I also called a fellow adoptee from my Philly group, who offered a different perspective on my discomfort with the level of exposure: “Go f— your comfort zone.” With the fallout from the Frontline documentary — which left viewers with a negative impression of adoption agencies, especially Holt — as well as new reports of mishandled paperwork that left many Korean adoptees anxious about their own searches, it appeared that my reunion with JeeWon offered hope to the entire adoptee community.

Oh. Well, when put like that, I felt I could do one more interview. Ironically, it was never published, because it occurred the day before the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The news cycle has since been consumed by *waves hand vaguely* other stuff.

On our last day in Seoul, Wie, the GOAL representative, reached an official at Holt International who offered to issue JeeWon an adoption certificate if she abandoned her search for the Ha family. The certificate would mean she could be notified directly of any DNA match in the system rather than depending on me to share results. It also meant her only set of adoption paperwork would no longer be valid. Wie helped JeeWon leave her DNA sample at the police station.

I was not present for that. My task that afternoon was to buy additional suitcases so we could haul home all the stuff we had bought.

Was the trip what I expected?

Yes and no. My tour of South Korea was more focused on adoption and less of a tourist experience than I had — naively? — expected. I’m more familiar with South Korean bureaucracy than I ever thought I would be, but I didn’t get to visit the exhibit about Hangul, the Korean alphabet, with JeeWon. I was happy to meet so many supportive fellow adoptees, but now I think I need an entire tour dedicated to King Sejong, who created Hangul in 1443, to feel like I have visited South Korea the way I wanted to. At heart, I’m a nerd like that.

In many ways, we were simply in an impossible situation. Between the media, the spoken and unspoken expectations we had for each other and the country, and the fact that we were two strangers with shared DNA forcing a sisterly intimacy that didn’t exist, we were doomed to fail. The heartwarming reunion videos you see on the news never show the hard parts.

Today, we are no longer in contact. We both said hurtful things. I’ve talked about her unrealistic expectations for the trip, but I’m leaving out the baggage and expectations I brought with me and probably pushed on her. Neither of us was equipped to handle this.

On the other hand, I got to experience a phenomenon of biological families: sharing subconscious traits with another person. Studies on genetic mirroring have examined what adoptees lose by not seeing their features reflected to them. Such mirroring offers us an unconscious way to feel we belong, and I’ve never belonged to anyone like that before. I didn’t know what I was missing until I saw someone who moves through the world the same way I do.

Yet this is also a beginning. I’m more committed to the Korean adoptee community. All people need community and authentic connections to thrive. Adoptees especially need each other, as we’re the only ones who share this particular flavor of life experience.

I don’t know what this commitment will look like. I do know I’m now a lot farther along on my adoptee journey than many others are, and I can help clear the way for those who follow, like the people at the makgeolli bar did for JeeWon and me.

At the institutional level, overseas adoptees are treated like second-class citizens in South Korea. The culture of shame that keeps many birth mothers silent still exists. The state has made it much easier to regain our citizenship, but since South Korea also has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, citizenship seems more like a ploy to boost the country’s population than genuine concern for our welfare. No government services exist to help adoptees with the transition to dual citizenship, and repatriated men find they need to complete South Korea’s mandatory military service.

But on a personal level, I found Koreans to be welcoming and happy we were coming home. A shopkeeper gave us each a brooch and braided JeeWon’s hair so tenderly that my sister, who had never had a mother to help her connect parts of herself, was moved to tears. A docent at the Blue House, the traditional home and office of the South Korean president, teared up upon learning we were adoptees visiting South Korea for the first time.

Nearly a year later, I’m still processing what it means to be Korean, to be American, to be JeeWon’s sister, to be adopted. I suspect I will do this for the rest of my life. I’m accepting the duality that I am special — singled out to go to a particular Midwestern family for all the love they could offer, while also being a number, one of hundreds of thousands of people whose stories are different yet eerily parallel to mine. The Korean adoptee network is helping me articulate my layers of mourning: the life I might have had, the people I never got the chance to love, the history in my bones I’ll never know, the grief of living with those unknowns.

I’ve learned that what mothers eat when we are in the womb becomes familiar to us, which probably explains my comfort food: a bowl of rice with a runny egg, kimchi and seaweed. Studies also have shown that our brains recognize the sounds and cadence of language, even in adoptees like me who were sent away from our native tongue before we were verbal.

I wonder: For nine months I was surrounded by my mother’s heartbeat. If I met her tomorrow, would I recognize it?