Poignant Voyage for Adoptees

It was one of those preposterous questions that kids sometimes ask.

During the first visit by a Korean head of state last summer on the issue of Korean American adoptees, 9-year-old Adam King asked first lady Lee Hee Ho, “Can we visit you in Korea?”

The startled wife of South Korean President Kim Dae Jung hesitated for a second, then said she would soon invite each person in attendance to fly over. Few of them took her seriously.

They should have.

Earlier this week, 46 families boarded an Asiana Airlines flight to South Korea, embarking on a once-in-a-lifetime journey courtesy of donors who call themselves friends of the influential first lady.

The group was a menagerie of young adults who had been adopted 20 to 30 years ago and parents who were taking their Korean-born children for their first visit home.

Many of the older adoptees felt wary about the trip, saying that the American way of life is such an intrinsic part of them that visiting South Korea might be a culture shock.

“I’m kind of waiting to see what’s going to happen, I just really don’t know what to expect from Korea,” said Michael Beaver, 30, who was adopted as a toddler and raised in a small town in Iowa.

The children--ages 4 to 16--looked forward to boarding a plane to take a journey “way off and far away,” said Peter King, 6, the brother of the child who asked the question that launched the trip.

Erik Reinertsen, an 8-year-old from Redondo Beach, summed up the importance of the trip in a way that belied his age: “It’s important to remember about my heritage,” he said while making an origami apple. “You just can’t forget about where you come from, and I hope I never will.”

Derrick Choi of the Korean Roots Forum, one of the sponsors, said Koreans in Los Angeles and Seoul started working on the trip two months after the presidential visit.

The first lady’s groundbreaking two-hour meeting in June had profound meaning for the 61 adoptees and family members because such a formal acknowledgment was a long time coming.

About 80,000 of the 150,000 Koreans adopted since the Korean War were taken in by Americans, the Korean Roots Forum reported.

During their trip, which concludes Sunday, the families will visit Korean national monuments and see “cultural exhibitions such as traditional dances and the martial art of taekwondo,” the Korean Roots Forum announced.

Never mind that the travelers could easily see that stuff in Los Angeles’ Koreatown. Most of the adoptees, many of whom are approaching 40, will touch their native soil for the first time.

Susan Soon-Keum Cox of Eugene, Ore., a member of Holt International Children’s Services, said that interest in traveling to Korea on the part of adoptees like herself “is exploding. This is something that in the last few years has gone crazy.”