Carissa used to look at the moon and wonder if her mother could see it too - she never found out

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Singapore: There is a word in Korean, sosokgam or 소속감, which means “a sense of belonging”.

For Carissa Smith, who was adopted from South Korea in 1985 and grew up on the NSW North Coast, it’s something that has always been elusive. Instead, she has lived with a life-long feeling of dislocation and anguish.

“I always struggled with ‘fitting in’, like I have a hole inside of me,” she says.

Carissa Smith was adopted from South Korea as a baby and has embarked on a search for her birth parents. Credit: Janie Barrett

“On my birthday, I would look at the moon and wonder whether my birth mother was looking at the same moon from Korea. I wondered if she missed me, I wondered if she loved me.”

Last year, she travelled to Seoul, hoping to find clues about her birth family that would paint a fuller picture of her identity, and answer questions that her three young Australian-Korean children might have one day.

It’s a journey numerous Australian adoptees have made, which has taken them to the doors of the Eastern Social Welfare Society, the agency in Seoul that has facilitated the adoptions of some 3600 Korean children to Australia since 1978. It holds the files containing critical information about their past.

Smith says she was ushered into a room where a staff member sat across from her holding a manila folder of her records, using a ruler and her hands to obscure large sections of it.

“I begged her to show me those bits, because I just wanted to try and find my birth mother,” she says.

Most of her file was in Korean and she says she was not allowed to touch the documents or take photos. When she asked to see the paperwork of her birth mother consenting to the adoption, she was denied.

Other adoptees recount similar painful experiences, running up against South Korea’s strict privacy laws, which protect the anonymity of parents at the expense of a child’s right to know.

From next month, Eastern will be required by South Korean law to begin transferring all of its files to a centralised government agency, the National Centre for the Rights of the Child. It is a process that is designed to streamline access requests for adoptees but it has triggered concern that important paperwork might be lost in the transfer.

They are concerns that shouldn’t be dismissed, given the findings of South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which, in March, identified harrowing and systemic failures in the country’s overseas adoption program, including falsified orphan records relating to cases managed by Eastern and other private adoption agencies.

The findings were based on the resolution of 56 cases, five of them Australian, from a total of 367 complaints lodged by adoptees in 11 countries.

The commission had been examining 10 Australian cases in all, but the probe was halted in April, about a month before its mandate was due to expire. It left more than 300 cases in limbo at a time when South Korea was lurching through a political crisis after its president was impeached and a snap election was called.

As for the five Australians whose cases have been “truth-established”, four are aged in their 30s or early 40s, and they have only recently received confirmation of this outcome via email from the commission. Details of the fifth case are unknown.

A commission report reveals the four cases were determined by findings of fabricated documents in their adoption files, including papers that said they were orphans, while other documents contained details of their biological parents. It found the adoptees’ right to know their identities had been infringed. Eastern did not respond to a request for comment.

It leaves many questions unresolved, among the most significant of which is: Are these four cases representative of potentially systemic issues in the Australian-Korean adoption program? The answer, hopefully, is that they are not. But the question remains: What should be done to get to the bottom of this?

During the recent Australian election, Labor committed to an internal investigation by the Department of Social Services, the agency with oversight of inter-country adoption. But it remains unclear what the parameters of its inquiry will be, whether any of it will be made public, and what involvement adoptees will have.

Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek has recommitted to the investigation, and a spokeswoman says more detail “will be available in due course”. Her department says it is engaging with Korean authorities about the file transfer process.

The five resolved Australian cases are just a tiny fraction of the thousands of members of the Australian-Korean adoptee community, many of whom grew up in homes surrounded by unfaltering love and support. Others weren’t so fortunate.

Anecdotally, stories have circulated in adoptee circles for years about irreconcilable differences in their adoption files from Eastern.

Carissa Smith, too, has paperwork irregularities and doesn’t know which parts of her file are real and which are not. She missed the deadline to put her case before the commission, which was not widely known about in Australia when its inquiry began in 2022.

It begs the question: Aren’t the adoptees owed some kind of explanation by the Australian authorities who handled their cases? And did anyone question the paperwork provided by Eastern at the time? Already, one whistleblower, Dr Josie McSkimming, has spoken about the red flags she encountered while working on the Korean adoption program in the NSW government in the 1980s.

These are difficult, painful questions for adoptees and their families that involve the fraught task of assessing past practices and social mores against present-day standards.

The shared pursuit of sosokgam is unifying some adoptees to continue pushing for answers.

“It’s a deep yearning for connection to our roots, to a place we’ve never truly known, but that holds a piece of who we are,” says KADS Connect, a new advocacy group of Australian-Korean adoptees that is pushing for a national inquiry.

The Korean adoption program was considered the gold standard in Australia. It has been 20 years since the Australian parliament held an inquiry into overseas adoption.

Maybe it’s time to take another look.

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