Now and Then

I wanted to share some photos from my visit to the site of the Seoul Sanitarium and Hospital Orphanage, run (in the 1950s) by Seventh Day Adventist Missionaries George and Grace Rue. Jimmy spent a few months staying with the Rues in the summer and fall of 1953, while Paul was in the United States trying to arrange for him to get a visa to immigrate. Mrs. Rue was a friend, with whom Paul had worked on charitable efforts to help street kids and other war refugees. Back then, the orphanage was located on the outskirts of the city, surrounded by rice fields that Jimmy remembers playing in. Unfortunately, the dormitories where Jimmy would have slept were torn down a few years ago, but a number of the original buildings remain. Today, it's smack in the middle of eastern Seoul, a modern hospital surrounded by high-rises. The contrast is amazing! 

(1) An aerial view of the compound in 1960, before the city grew up around it. The original hospital is the large white building at the center, while the Rue's red-brick house is located at the hospital's southwest corner.

(2) The hospital compound in the 1960s. The large white building is the original hospital. These would have been the sort of rice fields that Jimmy remembers wading through.

(3) George and Grace Rue on the front steps of the hospital in 1951.

(4) The old hospital today, which is still in use as a maternity ward now named for Dr. Rue.

(5) Mr. and Mrs. Rue's house today. You can see the modern city in the background.

Note: All historic photographs are courtesy of Sahmyook Medical Center, whose staff has been tremendously gracious.

Adoption Day

The photos in this slideshow are all from an event held last weekend in Seoul to draw attention to the plight of unwed mothers in Korea. Sponsored by a group called Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoptee Community of Korea, the intent was to promote alternatives to international adoption. The large puppets represent unwed mothers crying for their lost children.

Korea observed Adoption Day last week. That, in itself, was a bit shocking --- that there is demand for such a day on the calendar seems slightly odd to an American. But in the years since my father-in-law (Jimmy) was adopted, tens of thousands of Korean children have boarded planes for new lives and new families all around the world. Last year alone, 1,264 children were adopted internationally, according to government statistics. At the very beginning, quite a few of the children were like Jimmy - the mixed-race children of wartime unions who had no place in Korean society of that time. But since the 1960s, the vast majority of children who are adopted internationally are 100% Korean. For decades, the country has been providing children to be be raised by American and European families, but as Korea's economy surged; the country began to feel uncomfortable with its international reputation as a "baby exporter." And to complicate matters further, Korea's birthrate is strikingly low. Without shifts in family planning or immigration policy, the nation's population (like that of Japan and many Northern European countries) will begin to fall in coming decades. Hence; Adoption Day. National leaders created the holiday four years ago in hopes of promoting domestic adoption of Korean children by Koreans.

Today's Korean adoptees are almost all the unplanned children of unmarried women --- women who Korean social service agencies say have few choices. Culturally, single mothers just haven't been accepted. One adoptee-activist I spoke with compared the situation to that of the United States in the 1950s and 60s - women are shamed into giving up their children. Some talk of foster care as a solution for struggling families (a Korean system wasn't introduced until 1995), others want to promote acceptance of single moms and build up programs to offer them financial and emotional support. Government leaders often point to recent statistics suggesting that more Koreans are choosing to adopt. And a significant number of adult Korean adoptees have entered the debate, some arguing for the right of a child to be raised within the culture of its birth and calling for an end to international adoptions. Supporters of adoption counter that the timing just isn't right - so long as there are still Korean children in need of homes and parents overseas who want them, adoption agencies should facilitate. The "best interest of the child" can be a very complicated proposition.

For me --- immersed in the very beginning of this international adoption era --- it's fascinating to see how many of the same societal and cultural issues that led to adoptions like Jimmy's may also lead to the era's natural end.  Historically, Koreans adopted children from outside the father's bloodline only rarely; and even today, some couples who adopt go so far as to fake a pregnancy to create the illusion of a biological child to continue the family line. But they also feel a fierce pride in their cultural and ethnic identity --- something borne of centuries spent fighting off invading armies that goes far beyond any sort of patriotism the United States has developed in its (comparatively) short history. That identity suffers when the country is perceived as not being able to care for its own children. National leaders have set deadlines for the end of adoption from Korea, but the dates keep shifting, as cultural change is coming more slowly than some had hoped. It's been fascinating to observe all that's happening now - all the good and bad that ultimately grew out of these early adoptions. I'm writing primarily about the 1950s, but history doesn't exist in a vacuum (OK, sometimes it does, but then it's really, really boring!), and I find the connections between the past and the present fascinating. Korea has been a model for international adoptions worldwide over the past 60 years, and Korean policy could have a tremendous impact on the thousands of children being adopted by Americans each year, from China and Africa and Central America and Eastern Europe. I can't predict what's going to happen, but I have no doubt ... it all starts here.

For more information about the wide range of adoptee perspectives, check out the groups that sponsored some of the events I attended this week:

TRACK (Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoptee Community of Korea): www.adoptionjustice.com

ASK (Adoptee Solidarity Korea):

 www.adopteesolidarity.org

GOA'L (Global Overseas Adoptees' Link):

www.goal.or.kr

Children's Day

I had the opportunity to visit an orphanage here in Seoul on Children's Day (May 5th), and wanted to share some of my photos with all of you. As I spend hours at my desk, writing about this little four-year-old boy, it's sometimes easy to forget just how little that is. Having the chance to just spend time with these kids has really helped bring him to life for me. I'd be feeding the toddlers and thinking, "This is how old Jimmy was when his mom died," or playing with the older boys and girls and thinking, "This is how old Jimmy was when he was going down to the market by himself." As many of you probably know, most children who are in Korean orphanages today come from single moms who feel that they don't have any other option (more about that in tomorrow's post ... ), but seeing a mixed-race little girl in the orphanage - perhaps the child of a GI just like Jimmy - really got me thinking about how so much about Korea has transformed since the 1950s, but how below the surface, much remains the same.

Christmas Eve, 1952, Seoul

There was nothing much special about Christmas in Seoul. No family dinner. No twinkle lights. No Hollywood starlet offering up holly-red kisses to GIs after a USO show, or pristine white snow to mask the haunted skyline of a ruined city.

The news reports said that Billy Graham was at the front, singing hymns and talking about peaceful nights and the birth of Christ; but this place was never silent and it sure as hell wasn’t holy. Every few days, the Reds ensconced at the front just 35 miles to the north dropped leaflets over the city or sent messages out over the airwaves, threatening the battered survivors of two previous sieges that they would be back on Christmas morning. In place of fat white flakes, propaganda fluttered down on the rooftops. “Mr. Moneybags is in Florida this Christmas. Where are you? In Korea! You risk your life, big business rakes in the dough,” argued one flyer with a portly, leering man brandishing his cigar at all-American bikini beauties.

Seoul City Command paid the political bombardment little mind and hummed its normal routine all day, but when the soldiers headed out for a night of decidedly secular celebration in the bars and the brothels of the city, Paul went to get the boy. He hadn’t intentionally scheduled it for Christmas — he’d planned to spend the night playing cards with his buddies — but the woman who was keeping him, Lieutenant Farber's woman, had said to come tonight.  This might be his only chance.

It was only a couple blocks to the dark little corner shop where Jimmy slept in a small room hidden behind a hodge-podge of dusty meaningless goods stacked up in the window to mask what his guardian was really offering for sale behind a ragged curtain. Paul finished his dinner and headed out, walking briskly through the enforced darkness of a city at war.

Paul knocked on the door, stepped inside, and greeted the girl. She was small and dark; not too old and not too young. She was someone’s daughter, he thought, probably raised to be a virtuous woman who would faithfully serve her husband and give him sons. Somehow, she had ended up in this dingy backstreet shop, offering herself in exchange for the only thing that mattered after years of war — the security of a few American dollars tucked away in a cupboard. To Paul, she was indistinguishable from any of the hundreds of other camp followers who walked the streets in tight American skirts and fluffy Western-style hair, looking for rescue in the arms of a soldier or sailor. She must have picked up some English, if only enough to entice her clients, but she wasn’t interested in talking to Paul.

Maybe she was never much of a mother to the kid and she was relieved to be rid of him. Maybe it broke her heart to let him go, but she couldn't afford to say no. Spend a night with Farber every now and then, and she didn’t have to worry about the authorities shutting her down. The lieutenant was a big burly MP from Kansas who made a killing off the black market when he wasn’t enforcing the regulations that banned it. Good man to have on your side, but not a man you’d chose for your friend. She didn’t care about Farber, and he didn’t care about her. But she needed him. Maybe he had paid her off, and she considered the whole mess a successful transaction. She was just a mercenary whore who had taken the kid in to use him as bait, to attract American soldiers with his round little GI baby face; but she’d kept him reasonably well-fed and given him a warm place to sleep. It was better than the street, or the corner of the train station where clutches of orphans huddled together for warmth like litters of puppies.

Had she loved him? Would she miss him? Her face betrayed no emotion ...

Copyright Misty Ann Edgecomb, April 2009

*Note: The names of some secondary characters have been changed.

The Raynor Visit

Over the past two weeks, my father-in-law (Jimmy in Small Fish) and his wife have been visiting us in Korea. We tried to give them a taste of the culture, as well as bits and prices of the old Seoul that remain between the high-rises and neon of the modern city. I'll write more later - I'm still processing what it means for someone to return to their birthplace after a half-century - but in the meantime, I thought you might find some of our photos interesting. This slideshow begins at Gyeongbokgung, a historic palace, then takes us to the Sinchon neighborhood and Seoul Tower, as well as a day trip to the DMZ, where we stared down communist guards and briefly stood inside North Korea. Finally, photos chronicle a fishing trip that my husband Caleb and his dad took south of the city, in the mountains near Jinju, and a short trip that we made to Jeju Isalnd off Korea's southwestern coast. -Misty

Paul James Raynor Sr. 1928-2009

Paul's obituary is in The Oregonian today (April 1st). He'll be missed.

Your Daily News

Good morning everyone! I was just typing up some excerpts from  few of the articles published about the Raynor adoption in 1953, for a presentation I'll be making at the Fulbright Junior Researcher Conference on Jeju Island next week, and thought you might find them interesting:

The Huronite and the Daily Plainsman, Huron, South Dakota 

ST PAUL - It looks like “Jimmy,” the five-year-old Korean orphan who helplessly watched the Chinese Communists behead his mother, may soon cross the Pacific Ocean for a new life with an ex-Army Sergeant in South Dakota. 

A 25-year-old bachelor, Sgt. 1-c Paul Raynor of Huron, S.D., legally adopted Choi Kyung Hyun - now named Jimmy P. Raynor - as his son while he was  with the Seoul City Command in Korea on May 22, 1953. 

But the lanky soldier didn’t calculate that Army regulations and America’s immigration and naturalization laws might set up barriers to his plan to take Jimmy home with him ...” 

The Morning World-Herald, Omaha, Nebraska 

A 5-year-old Korean War refugee and the only daddy he has ever known met  for the first time in five months at Omaha Union Train Station Depot Sunday at  4 a.m.  Clutching a fire engine, two cowboy pistols and candy, the youngster had eyes  only for Paul Raynor, Huron, S.D., GI who adopted him while with the Army  in Korea. 

There was no hint in the reunion of the red tape that for months separated the  orphan, named Jimmy, and his father, who was granted an unprecedented  ruling by the Attorney General of South Dakota before the boy could be  brought from Seoul, Korea, to the United States. 

When Mr. Raynor and Jimmy saw each other they embraced, exchanged  greetings and the ex-GI remarked, “Boy, does he look good ...”