Free The Birth of Korean Cool by Euny Hong Page A

father and stepmother declared that they were not going to take care of Daniel anymore, so his mother put him up for adoption. Daniel was six years old
at the time.
    Daniel was only at the orphanage for three months. “I was very lucky,” he said, recalling that any day a kid at the orphanage got adopted was an exciting one. The adoptee
“would get a gift box from their [new] parents. It would always have a picture book and chocolate, so all the kids would look forward to that. There would be a big party, and everyone would
get snacks and candy.”
    Daniel’s gift box included photos of his new family and home. “All the pictures were very foreign,” he said. “I saw pictures of my parents’ house, a two-story house
with a big front yard. And my father had an orange Ford truck up front.” There were also photos of his adoptive parents, Linda and Larry Gray, as well as his new little sister, another Korean
orphan who had previously been adopted by the family.
    It took a long time before Daniel thought of the Grays as his parents. “I didn’t speak for a long time,” he said. “I had a lot of major health problems and needed a lot
of dental work.” The adjustment was rocky. “I was very distant, very scared.” He was also mistrustful. The Grays tried to introduce Daniel to Korean American friends as well as to
a Korean minister, but “When I first got to America I was really scared they were going to send me back, so I disassociated as much as possible.” This included forgetting all his
Korean.
    Despite a rebellious childhood and adolescence, Daniel excelled at school, at art, and at the guitar. He became a writing teacher and a volunteer at inner-city schools in Wilmington. But he felt
restless. At age twenty-six, he went to Korea to take a job teaching English at a small school in the southern city of Gyeongju.
    After two years, he gathered the courage to go to Seoul and try to find his birth mother. It was a logistical nightmare. “The process of finding your parents is not very well
detailed,” he recalled. “There is a lot of misinformation.” It’s a good thing he didn’t wait too long to embark on his search: “The agencies that helped me five
years ago no longer exist.” Not only that, his original orphanage, the missionary-run Holt group, no longer helps orphans locate their birth parents. Nowadays orphans have to go through a
third party to locate their adoption records.
    The reason for this red tape is horrifying: “There are a lot of anti-adoption groups,” he said, “groups that feel that the orphans should not have been put up for adoption in
the first place. They say, the parents weren’t properly vetted.” So institutions make it difficult for children to find their birth parents, a situation that only serves to punish the
innocent.
    Finally, Daniel went through Holt. “They opened up my file. They sent a letter to my mother.” Two weeks later, she replied that she wanted to meet her son. In fact, that was why she
made sure she left her address with Holt from the beginning: “She was waiting for me,” Gray recalls.
    The long-awaited reunion happened at the Hapjeong train station in Seoul; Daniel’s biological mother had come in from her hometown.
    “She gave me a big hug and said,
‘Oreh gan man i eh yo.’
” Which means, “It’s been a long time.”
    “She asked me how I was, if I was healthy. She asked what I was doing.” She also told him his real age: he was one year older than he was led to believe. When his birth mother put
Daniel up for adoption, she knocked a year off his age, thinking that a younger child might stand a better chance of getting adopted.
    Daniel chose to stay in Korea, which is a very brave thing to do, given the country’s hostile climate toward Korean adoptees. Illegitimate children now have legal status without the
declaration of paternity, but a lot of Koreans are uncomfortable with his western last name. “There are still