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Sent to Australia under the false assertion they were orphans, adoptees from South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam speak of the lies they have struggled to reconcile, and doubt the Albanese government’s promised inquiry can bring resolution. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.

The lies that haunt inter-country adoptees

Eastern Social Welfare Society in Seoul, South Korea.

Credit: Google Maps

The reunion was not a fairytale and it fulfilled no one’s expectations. It was messy and heavy and disorienting. Media weren’t invited, but they wouldn’t have been interested if they were: in my profession, we like adoption stories with happy endings.

It was 2010. The young woman, who does not wish to be named, had been adopted under false pretences by an Australian family through the South Korean adoption agency Eastern Social Welfare Society. Her biography had been fabricated and she grew up in the Australian suburbs with the false belief she was an orphan.

Now, she was reunited with the mother she thought was dead. The family room that day was filled with other relatives, tearful and awkward. The young woman couldn’t speak Korean; her family couldn’t speak English. A translator haltingly brokered their conversation. The mother had no idea her daughter had been sent overseas and had been told she was settled with another Korean family. The young woman explained she thought her mother had died many years ago.

The woman feared she might be rejected – instead, she learnt that everything she knew about her adoption and her past was wrong. Not merely wrong but concocted. The reunion was less a moment of joyous tenderness than a confusing realisation of their manipulation.

The repugnant practices of South Korea’s Eastern Social Welfare Society, the largest adoption agency for the world’s largest adoption market, have been exposed in recent years via the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission into its practices. The agency was responsible for the adoption of almost 4000 children by Australians.

The commission’s preliminary report, released in February, found the agency had, for decades, trafficked kidnapped children and falsified birth certificates. In many cases, adopted children were declared orphans when in fact they were the children of single mothers coerced into relinquishing their child. The agency had “facilitated large-scale, inter-country adoptions with minimal procedural oversight”, the report said. “The identities and family information of many children were lost, falsified, or fabricated … [and] after being sent abroad, adoptees were left without appropriate legal protections.”

Last month, the Albanese government pledged to hold an inquiry into Australia’s processing of South Korean adoptees should it be re-elected. The proposed inquiry would be undertaken by the Department of Social Services, which every adoptee I spoke to this week considered inadequate – a government entity would effectively be investigating itself.

Samara Kim was one of the Eastern Social Welfare Society adoptees. She is also a PhD candidate who writes on international adoption practices. “That department should be part of the inquiry, not leading an inquiry into themselves,” she says.

Kim also grew up believing she was an orphan. Only much later, in young adulthood, did she realise the scant biographical information contained in her adoption documents was fake. She was not an orphan.

Like many inter-country adoptees, Kim grew up with a sense of existential insecurity. She had to ingratiate herself doubly: both as an Asian in white Australian suburbia and as the adoptee seeking security and validation. If this wasn’t enough, there would come the profound revelation that her history had been invented. “Once you realise that those things are not true, or outright lies, it really starts to fracture and unravel all the foundational pieces of yourself,” she says. “I remember reading a poem by someone the other day and they kind of said that you spend your whole life making the jigsaw puzzle of yourself, putting all the pieces in place. And at this stage of life, you’ve put together 10,000 pieces, 20,000 pieces, to make up the tapestry of your life. And then when you find out that these foundational things are not true, it’s kind of like the board has disappeared and all those pieces have just shattered on the ground and you don’t know how to even start picking them up.”

Kim explains the conditions in South Korea that encouraged its prolific export of children are complex and have shifted over the years, but that there was a convergence between Western vanity and Korean patriarchal nationalism that facilitated the adoption trade. “The sense of Western superiority and saviourism plays a big part in this,” Kim says. “And also, in the earlier days of Korean adoption, the strong Korean sense of bloodlines and kinship and their nervousness about biracial babies born during the Korean war.”

Later, she says, adoption simply became a very profitable business.

As significant as South Korea has been in inter-country adoption, Kim says the current media emphasis on the country is arbitrary. Australia has adopted children from various countries with dubious practices, she says, and it’s important that our reception of these children, and historic negligence and incuriosity about their origins, be investigated.

In 1982, Taiwanese police raided the home of Julie Chu, a legal secretary. The following year she was convicted of running a criminal syndicate devoted to the trafficking of babies. In 1984, the Taiwanese High Court upheld her conviction and found that “blinded by greed, [Chu] repeated their criminal acts no less than 35 times; they persuaded doctors and midwives to issue false birth certificates; they registered false household registrations, fraudulently arranged adoption papers and exit permits … causing a loss of public confidence in these systems”.

The Chu trafficking ring astonished Taiwan when it was exposed, and there are suggestions that not only were mothers coerced and manipulated into relinquishing their children and doctors conscripted into the fabrication of documentation, but that babies were kidnapped and sold.

At least 26 “Julie Chu babies” were adopted by Australian families, most of them in South Australia. Kimbra Butterworth-Smith is one of them. When she was young, and the Chu ring was exposed, journalists knocked on her door. They thought she might be one of the babies. “Mum freaked out,” Butterworth-Smith remembers. “She contacted other adoptee parents and everyone just went silent – no, don’t contact us again. The previously happy group of adoptive families just completely stopped and everyone went underground. But then reporters told Mum and Dad that it was all fine, they couldn’t find any connection. And that gave Mum and Dad some rest.”

Many years passed. Then in 1997, journalists from Australia’s 60 Minutes called saying they thought they’d found Butterworth-Smith’s biological mother. “I cried a lot and didn’t want to be part of it,” she says. “I remember spending that summer in the sun as much as I could to change my skin. I hated being Asian.”

The media attention didn’t lead to much. But Butterworth-Smith’s curiosity was “ignited” when she became pregnant in 2004. Her research was insistent and she was indeed part of the Julie Chu cohort.

In 2017, Butterworth-Smith met Julie Chu in Taiwan. Taipei’s chief of police was in the room too, as was one of the corrupt midwives who helped Chu source the babies. “One of my memories of that meeting is giving Tim Tams and Vegemite to her, like I’m doing a diplomatic mission,” she says. “Here I am giving gifts to people who have inherently impacted my life, good, bad and ugly, and, you know, it left me with a very complex identity crisis that I’m still unfolding. I just think that beautifully speaks to the complicated nature of being the adoptee, of pleasing others and having to be grateful for something that we had no say over.”

How did a criminal racket so effortlessly persuade the Australian government it was a legitimate adoption agency?

It took years, Lynelle Long says, to emerge from her “adoption fog”. Brought from Vietnam in 1973 when she was five months old, Long was flown to Melbourne and placed in the “care” of abusive parents. For decades, her pursuit of institutional accountability was frustrated by bureaucratic thickets and jurisdictional handballing. But in 2022, via the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Long received the maximum compensation available through its redress scheme and last year received a letter from immigration minister Andrew Giles that said, in part, “I am sorry that there was not a robust system in place when you were adopted. I am sorry the Department failed you.”

Over years, Long says, she came to internalise adoption’s myths of benevolence – it took her a long time to see the sexual abuse for what it was. She came to think of adoption as something for which she had to be infinitely grateful, and her victimisation within that context didn’t compute. Any fluctuations in her gratitude – any doubts – could inspire guilt.

“The adoption fog is basically being brainwashed by your adoptive parents and adoptive culture, the one that tells you how lucky you are, how saved and rescued, and what a wonderful life you’ve got here,” Long says. “That’s what I was mimicking. If you had asked me when I was 18, 19 what my life was like, I was saying, ‘Oh, I’ve got a wonderful family, I’ve got a wonderful country, I’ve had a beautiful life. How great is adoption? It’s such a win-win.’ But then ask me another 10 years after, when I started to wake up to what the hell had actually gone on in my life and why I’d suffered abuse for all of those years, well then I just started to unpack things and wonder why the hell do I not know who I am?”

Long was liberated but in the most gruesome manner – her late recognition of her adoptive father’s abuse. When she could look back on her past and see it for what it was, “Well, that hurtled me out of the fog quickly.” Long says it can be harder for adoptees who have more loving, respectful relationships with their adoptive parents to later question issues of “privilege and power and racism and colonialism that are often entwined with inter-country adoptions”.

In 1998, Long founded InterCountry Adoptee Voices. For decades she has been a fierce advocate for adoptee rights and historical reckoning, while prosecuting the argument that inter-country adoption is largely unjustifiable and frequently manipulated.

She has done so at some cost. Her work is purposeful but taxing, and she remains irresolute about her own identity. “Looking back, I can actually now say that nothing was fixed,” Long says. “I have had to completely reinvent myself. When I came out of that fog of just parroting everything I’d heard my whole life and I had to figure out for myself who I am and what I want to be between these worlds, it showed me that a lot of who I thought I was was just a camouflage. Probably the best word to describe it was ‘chameleonic’. Adoptees are so good at being chameleons because our survival so relies on it, that it becomes our identity.

“There was nothing that was stable. Not many people have to question whether their parents are good people or not. And it’s really hard when you’ve had to question absolutely everything about yourself to the point where there is nothing that’s been stable. That’s why we all end up having to do so much deep therapeutic work because our whole foundation has actually been built on lies, mistruths and guesses from people who purported to have our best interests [at heart] but actually didn’t.”

Long says she can now – in her 50s – recognise authentic elements of herself. Resilience is one. “I’ve become a strong fighter,” she says.

Each adoptee I spoke to this week showed some combination of scepticism and fatigue with journalists. They had become familiar with my profession’s habit of narrowly framing complex issues, of applying cookie cutters to the messiness of humanity. “It’s been really discouraging and demoralising to realise that journalism only wants what’s popular and trendy,” Long says. “Most media outlets just want that traditional story about research and reunion and images of sobbing and what a happy outcome for everybody! and I’m just so over that.

“There’s 1.2 million of us, at a minimum, that have been sent from country to country through inter-country adoption. Why is it that the media only pick up on South Korea? It’s right in a way, because South Korea are the biggest sending country. They have sent the most children out over the decades, and China follows behind. And then there are other countries as well.”

When China announced it would end inter-country adoption, late last year, “the media wasn’t interested about the Chinese adoptees, 160,000 of them who have been sent abroad”, Long says.

“What’s going to happen for all those adoptees? Because what happens is, when they close all the services that are supposed to be there for our lifelong journey, well… An 18-year-old Chinese adoptee may not have any interest in finding her birth family, but say in 20 years’ time, when she’s 40, she’s going to be much more interested, because having children really is this massive trigger point for us to suddenly think: my God, this is what my mother’s gone through. But nobody in the media picks up on the implications and the impact of what happens when countries close down.”

Motherhood was indeed triggering for Long. She wondered if she was capable of being a good mother. She was fearful also of transmitting her own anxiety to her children, a common fear of children who have been abused. “Becoming pregnant was earth-shattering,” Long says. “It was the first time that I, in a bodily sense, somatically, could feel what my mother had gone through. When I gave birth to my son, I just could not fathom how desperate someone must be to give up that child.

“I guess it’s different if it’s a rape. But you’ve carried a child for nine months and you’ve bonded to that child just on a somatic level. It’s incredibly powerful. Nothing that this world can offer can ever replace that connection that is so visceral that we have with our pregnant mother, and so having a child of my own just really brought that home.

“I think most of us adoptees who have children, because we’re so profoundly impacted by not knowing who our mothers were, we overcompensate with our children and end up trying to give them everything that we never got.”

Kimbra Butterworth-Smith reflects similarly about the awesome beauty and fear of first becoming a mother herself. “I talk to my kids about this, that I have a sensitivity to rejection and abandonment by you guys,” she says. “I have to get ready for when you leave home. And that’s okay, that is normal development. When my firstborn, as he started going through the 14, 15, push–pull thing, which is normal development, I didn’t handle that well. It spoke to something deeper in me. But these days I don’t personalise things so much. I’ve learnt.”

A few years ago, Lynelle Long’s therapist encouraged her to celebrate the small victories. Long is fierce, bright, impassioned – but her intensity is such that it can obscure her achievements.

And so she did. Long remains adamant that inter-country adoption is mostly unconscionable and still vulnerable to exploitation. A true reckoning with decades of negligent vetting is made difficult by the defensiveness of adoptive parents. It is a rare person who can admit to causing harm or of participating in harmful schemes – not least when their behaviour was governed by lofty intentions. “I speak to the rare few adoptive parents who can actually say that they now absolutely regret it, because they realise they were involved in the trafficking of children,” Long says. “But there’s not many. There is a defensiveness.”

For now, the Albanese government’s pledge is unchanged: there will be a departmental inquiry.

“And that’s not enough,” Long says.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 17, 2025 as "Emerging from the ‘adoption fog’".

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