Father of 1,000: Korean War Orphans

Russell Blaisdell, a chaplain colonel in the US Air Force during the Korean War is attributed for saving nearly a thousand children orphaned during the horrific war. Approximately 37,000 US soldiers died in the war, compared with the estimated 2 million civilian deaths in North and South Korea. The children of the streets were casualties of another kind, living while their parents died, but dying because they didn't know how to live.

Russell Blaisdell, assigned as a chaplain to oversee the other chaplains in the US Air Force along with Chaplain "Wally" Wolverton, already in Korea when Russell got there, were the first two US Air Force chaplains with no others imminently scheduled to arrive. Having no specific office, place to sleep and at lose ends about overseeing chaplains that weren't in Korea yet, Russell started dedicating his great energy to helping the children who crawled from make-shift shelters, who chased after American trucks begging and who were tattered and shell-shocked. Along with Wally and sergeant Mike Strang they drove their assigned jeep around, scooping up orphans and transporting them to various care shelters staffed by Korean volunteers. Care of course was easier to provide than food, a war was going on, so Russell would ask servicemen for contributions, and many willingly gave, some giving as much as 50% of their pay! 

Russell's mission to help the orphans didn't really get started until after US and Korean forces were able to retake Seoul after its capture early in the war. The shock of seeing orphans, and so many of them, crying on the streets or crawling in rice bags to die, fueled Russell's energy to help in any way he could. He had already seen orphans throughout the country, but none were as miserable and destitute as those in Seoul. Children were everywhere. Many had parents who had been buried in mass graves -- the bodies of soldiers, priests, government workers were killed when the North Korean stormed Seoul, and all orphans seen by the North Koreans were killed too. And he knew that if/when the North Koreans returned, these orphans would stand no chance. Yet, Russell was surprised at the fight for survival in many so young, and Wally, Russell, and sergeant Mike Strang started organizing places for the orphans to regularly receive help. That is, until for health reasons Wally had to suddenly return to the States. 

Russell and Mike were then alone to organize the removal of the 1,000 orphans they had scattered in various care centers, and the North Koreans were coming back, and this time with Chinese soldiers as allies. Time was important. Evacuation was underway, but how to transport 1,000 orphans and their care-givers?!?! 

Russell frantically contacted various departments, offices, and repeatedly, but there was priority on soldiers and supplies. People were very compassionate, many had helped contribute money, the motor brigade had been most helpful and were always on the lookout for orphans, but there was just no space for 1,000 orphans as troops were ordered out of Seoul in limited transport trucks packed with artillery, soldiers and essentials. Russell was frantic. He could have evacuated with the others, and as a colonel that was totally acceptable and expected, but he chose to remain with the orphans and pray, while running to other departments to ask for assistance.

Kids of the Korean War: Father of a Thousand

Finally he was assigned a boat! A boat that would transport the children to Jeju island. The fortune of a boat as transport would be cold and most miserable for the smallest children, but transport is transport. Yet, when he saw the battered scow that couldn't possibly hold even 100 and even less in the winter sea, he adamantly refused to put a single soul on.

When almost everyone had evacuated, Russell, frantically running around without sleep for five days, went one last time to the Air Force headquarters to make an appeal. Seeing an Air Force Colonel, he ran up to him, unshaven and wild-eyed, and began to blather, "I'm in trouble, I'm in trouble and I need some help." Air Force Colonel T. C. Rogers listened to Russell, pulled out his operations manual and placed a call. Then to Russell he said, "It just so happens that I have a wing of C-54s that have just landed in Japan from the States, and they don't have a mission. If you get those kids to Kimpo Airport by 0800 tomorrow morning, we'll get them to Jeju." 

Russell said he would and rushed back to Incheon where the kids had already been transported over a three-day span of time. He had less than 24 hours to transport the kids 28 miles without trucks over pitted, bombed roads back to Seoul, a task that had taken 3 days just a few days prior. He knew he had to do it! His opportunity came at 0500 when a transport vehicles loaded cement onto a scow. Pulling rank on the drivers, he ordered them to transport the kids to Kimpo. They were not happy, but rank is to be respected. Transport commenced, and suddenly an apoplectic high-ranking colonel drove up screaming, "What are you doing with my trucks?" When he heard that they were being used to transport 1,000 orphans for their chance of hope, the colonel gladly gave Russell permission to commence the evacuation.

The C-54s stayed on the snowy tarmac until 1000 when the children were delivered to the planes for transport. The orphan rescue operation became known as "Operation Kiddy Car", and reading about the children in newspapers and magazines, people in the US began sending donations and supplies. Ms. Hwang Oh-Soon, a woman already with 11 years experience at running an orphanage, became the new director, and a very capable one at that. She organized the kids, cleaned them up, and when Russell returned for a brief visit to Jeju in August 1951 (his tour had completed three months prior), Russell Blaisdell was greeted with a large banner held by the children, thanking him. He was proud to say he saw the beginning of smiles on the resilient faces of many of the orphans.

On January 26, 2001 Russell Blaisdell returned to Korea to reconnect with Ms Hwang Oh-Soon, who was still alive at 102 and still the director at the orphanage [The Orphans Home of Korea, Kyounggi-do] that had been relocated near the capital after the war. She and a cloud of orphans from Operation Kiddy Car met with Russell, age 90. Many orphans gathered also to meet, greet and personally thank Russell for giving them the gift of life, for without being transported to Jeju, the 1,000 orphans and their caretakers as well would have a had a very slim chance to surviving the coming North Korean invasion. It was a touching reunion, and a time or reminiscing and sharing.

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[YouTube] "Arirang Prime－Blaisdell′s Operation Kiddy Car Airlift 브레이즈델 대령의 유모차 수송작전" (15:29)

When Russell first arrived in Seoul after pushing the North Koreans back in 1950, he estimated 6,000 orphans on the street. After the war ended in stalemate in 1953, 54,000 children were officially registered in orphanages, the youngest too young to remember their own names, let alone their parents' names, hometown or birthdays.

In Memory of Molly Holt

It is with profound sadness that we share the heartbreaking news that Molly Holt, daughter of Holt founders Harry and Bertha Holt, passed away early in the morning on May 17 in Korea. She was 83 years old. 

In South Korea, Molly was known by many names, from the Mother Teresa of Korea to the Mother of all Korea’s Orphans. Although she devoted her life to caring and advocating for children and adults with medical, developmental and physical needs in Korea, she leaves a legacy that is felt around the world.

Born on November 24, 1935 in Firesteel, South Dakota, Molly was the second eldest daughter of Harry and Bertha Holt, who pioneered international adoption in the mid-1950s and later founded Holt International. Molly attended high school in Creswell, Oregon, and later graduated from both the University of Oregon and Sacred Heart Hospital, where she earned a nursing degree in 1956.

The summer of that same year, Molly traveled for the first time to South Korea — fresh out of nursing school, and ready to help her father care for children left orphaned and abandoned in the wake of the Korean War. A devout Christian like her parents, Molly had a vision for her future while in Korea. “I felt that this was where the Lord would have me be for the rest of my life,” she later said.

Molly would go on to spend most of her adult life at the Ilsan Center in Korea, a nurturing, long-term care home that her parents built in the early 1960s for children and adults with special medical, developmental and physical needs. As a nurse and foster mother to the residents of Ilsan, Molly worked to ensure they received the specialized care they needed to reach their potential and live as independently as possible. Through her tireless advocacy, Molly also made it possible for many children in care at Ilsan to join loving, permanent families through adoption. Today, hundreds of families adopt children with special needs every year from countries around the world. But long before it was common, Molly actively sought families for the children who others considered “unadoptable.” Like her parents before her, Molly helped change the culture of adoption by showing that every child is equally worthy of love and acceptance, and that every child deserves to be part of a family.

Only a few times in her life did Molly leave the Ilsan Center for extended periods, and only to pursue additional training so that she could better meet the needs of the children and adult residents of Ilsan. She studied at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, attended Korean language school and Multnomah School of the Bible, did post-graduate work in special education at the University of Oregon, and in December 1991 she earned a master’s degree in special education and rehabilitation from Northern Colorado University. Throughout her life, she received many honors, including a presidential award, the National Order of Civil Merit from Korea in 1981, World Vision’s Bob Pierce award in 1984 and in 2009, for her lifetime of dedication to orphans and people with disabilities, she received the Royal Order of Merit from the king of Norway.

Diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2013, Molly nevertheless remained steadfast in her commitment to the children and adult residents of the Ilsan Center. Despite her declining health, she said that she would devote her remaining life “to the things that she loves with her whole heart.” Molly never married or had children, but to the residents of Ilsan — many of whom are now in their 50s and 60s — Molly was their only family. They called her “Unee,” or big sister, a name that Molly cherished.

“Molly Holt moved so many with her tireless and admirable efforts, especially for those children with mental and physical disabilities,” says Stephen Noerper, senior director of the Korea Society and senior advisor to the United Nations. “As a brother of adopted, special needs siblings, I salute and admire her legacy of service. She offered six decades of tireless devotion, stood as a credit to her brave parents, and touched, formed and grew many through her compassion. The Korea Society and the entire community of those bent on international friendship and support extend deepest condolences to her family and friends and the entire Holt organization. To Molly Holt’s nobility, spirit and service, all tribute and our love and heartfelt prayers.”

Of Molly’s passing, Lee HongKoo, former prime minister of the Republic of Korea, wrote, “The contribution of Molly Holt to humanity and humanism … is a historic achievement. The modern history of Korea will record her achievement with gratitude and admiration. Many of us in Korea join the Holt adoptee community in recording our love and farewell.”

“I am saddened to hear of the passing of Molly Holt,” says Oregon senator Ron Wyden. “Although she lived most of her life in Korea, all of us in Oregon consider her an exceptional Oregonian.  Molly leaves a legacy of caring and compassion that will endure for generations to come.  Her devotion to orphaned children in Korea and around the world touched the lives of thousands of children and families and changed the hearts and minds of many more for the better.”

Steve Stirling, president and CEO of MAP International, lived at the Ilsan Center in Korea before he was adopted in 1966, at the age of 11. “I thank God for Molly for faithfully serving those in need through Holt and living in Ilsan to care for disabled residents,” he says. “While we will miss you now, I will rejoice when we unite for eternity in Heaven with our Lord and Savior Jesus. So long for now until we meet again in our forever home.”

Please pray for Molly’s family and for the many people who have loved her that they might find peace and comfort in their memories.

Services for Molly will be held in Korea at 10:00 a.m. on May 21 at Holt Ilsan Center of Korea. Molly’s family requests that gifts be made in her honor to the Molly Holt Fund for Children With Special Needs. If you would like to share memories or photos of Molly Holt, please email them to photosubmission@holtinternational.org.

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Article Source:  "In Memory of Molly Holt" by Robin Munro

Renegotiating "Homeland" for Korean Adoptees

Andrea Kim Cavicchi, a PhD candidate in Modern Korean History at the UCLA gave this presentation on "Rediscovering 'Homeland' and Negotiating Belonging for Overseas Korean Adoptees in Korea." Her research in diasporas, transnationalism, globalization, multiculturalism, nationalism, race, ethnicity and identity brings her to Korea to explore the return migration of many of the Korean babies and children who were sent abroad for adoption and return as English teachers, researchers, students, and visitors in search of a glimpse of their ethnic heritage that they were severed from at a very young age. I believe she said in her presentation that she is not one of the adoptees, although she is of Korean heritage raised in the United States.

Her research project explores the lives of Korean adoptees who were born in Korea, adopted overseas to Western nations as infants or young children through the practice of overseas Korean adoption, and who return to Korea for a brief visit or for a span of living as adults. It is estimate that approximately 200,000 children have been adopted from South Korea to Western nations since the 1950s. Since the late 1990s and early 2000s, roughly 2,500 of these not adult adoptees return to their birth country every year to search for birth families, teach English, study Korean, attend conferences that aim to cultivate an international community for Korean adoptees. She is investigating how these adult Korean adoptees negotiate the question of belonging in relation to institutional and social structures, and conversely, the different ways that the Korean state deals with these adult Korean adoptees.

click to enlarge

click to enlarge

Her project is shedding light on the issues that adult Korean adoptees confront as they maneuver the shifting discourse of Koreanness in Korea. One aim of her project is to investigate ways in which overseas Korean adoptee subjectivities have been constituted through shifting fields of power and managed through historically particular, geopolitical, social, and economic discourses, all linked to the Korean state. Another aim is to investigate the creative ways that adult adoptees construct and imagine their own identities, empower themselves, and subvert the very institutions and sources of power that constitute their subjectivities as Korean adoptees.

Her main questions to be addressed are:

1. What compels these Korean adoptees to return to Korea as adults, and why do many of these adoptees search for their birth families?
2. Why have a number of "lucky" Korean children, who were adopted by parents living in affluent Western nations, returned to Korea as adults and formed an activist adoptee community that advocates immediate adoption reform and for the rights of unwed mothers? [Unwed mothers needs to be defined: unwed mothers are distinguished between single mothers who could have been married but when they gave birth were divorced, separated, widowed or other. Unwed mothers were not married prior to giving birth.]
3. Why does a nation that boasts one of the most powerful market economies in the world and expresses so much shame over sending its children overseas through media publications and government policies continue its overseas adoption practices in 2014?

Some informative snippets shared on the initial motivation for international adoption and more recently the return of those adoptees are:

Korean adoption didn't start until the late 1950s. The Korean War (1950-1953) left a shattered and desolate country with documentation of over a million displaced people in 1954. The country was in poverty, children were being born of mixed parentage from the large numbers of foreign soldiers present and who interacting with Korean women, and the first children internationally adopted were those mixed blooded children, the unwanted children in a country that was intolerant of racial mixings of blood. However, the poverty of the nation soon provoked impoverished families who couldn't raise their children to give up their young ones. Later, and especially in the 1980s during Korea's rapid industrialization, unwed women were giving birth to pure-blooded Korean children, but the shame in this was the connotations of sexual frivolity besmirching extended family honor. Those children could not be raised by single mothers with family support and therefore, new homes--mostly overseas--were found for those also unwanted children. In the mid-1980s more than 8,000 children were adopted overseas a year. This was abruptly curtailed for a brief time during the Seoul Olympics as the media picked up on the fact that South Korea was "marketing" their children abroad. North Korea was particularly censorious of the act, and the shame of the North Korean criticism did bring about a brief moratorium on international adoption and then a decline in the numbers adopted overseas.

Some historial kilometer markers in the history of population control in Korea ...
which of course affected adoption policies too.

In the 1990s these adoptees sent outside of Korea were starting to return to Korea, to learn about their ethnic heritage, to question why perhaps they were adopted. South Korea was ill-prepared to "welcome" the adoptees back and many citizens were downright rude to the Korean blooded young people who didn't know the Korean language ... as if that were their fault. In Korea, family means everything, and therefore, these family-less adoptees were to be scorned ... and they often were. In more recent years, however, attitudes have been changing and the Korean adoptees are now given tours by the government, some get study scholarships, and the Korean people have become more open-minded to adoptees returning to Korea. Much of the open-mindedness is a result of adoption being heavily featured in Korean dramas as well as movies. Obviously, for the topic to peek its head in so many types of media is to reveal a country that has a strange fascination with the topic.

"Homeland" is a perspective term. While it might mean the land of one's birth, it does not always feel like "home", and the term needs to be deconstructed and reconstructed. There is certainly an issue of belonging and yet not belonging with the returning adoptees. Many say it feels good to "belong" because "everyone looks like me", but on the deeper note, they don't really "belong" as their upbringing values have been shaped differently; their expectations of the other are different as well.

Many of the adoptees go in search of their biological families. This is a very hard process, and one that often involves a cluttered paper trail, and unwilling adoption agencies who are more protective of homeland citizens (the mothers who gave up the children) that the Korean children who were forcibly expatriated. Some adoptees have a deep desire to be reunited with their birth families, usually only locating the mother is possible; some have no desire. Some are curious, having no particular desire, but as they interact and form bonds with other adoptees who are searching or are of the few who have been reunited with family members, many of the mildly curious become interested in the search too.

Some of the organization within Korea now and which help returning adoptees are:

GOAL (Global Overseas Adoptees' Link) - more of a service based organization for helping returning adoptees adapt to Korea (language assistance, study scholarships ...) as well as help adoptees locate birth family members.

ASK (Adoptee Solidarity Korea) - their mission is to address associated problems with Korean overseas adoption. Through education and activism, they aim to raise awareness, activate change, and support alternatives to overseas Korean adoption.

TRACK (Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community in Korea) - Their goal is to raise awareness, make change, and set the record straight on adoption practices that do not consider either truth and transparency or the rights of the child who is treated in a top-down fashion.

KoRoot (the house of Korean roots) - KoRoot is a guesthouse for Korean adoptees from all over the world and who return to visit their "mother" country. It is also a NGO finding solutions on overseas adoption matters.

INKAS (International Korean Adoptees Services) - INKAS is the only organization included in the big five organizations helping adoptees that is not run by adoptees or a combination of adoptees and native-born Koreans. Their activism stems from within the country of Korea itself and the change they strive for isn't led by returning adoptees but Korean-born Koreans.

While Korean adoption is a very hot and controversial issue in Korea with the government making laws that deny the rights of children thought "best" to hide in non-transparent adoption situations, the returning adoptees are speaking out on behalf of the future adopted children. The adoptees feel well within their rights as objects of the "sociopolitical exchange" to represent those undergoing more modern sociopolitics in finding "homes" for more "unwanted" children. And one of the hottest, most contested issues in the non-transparent adoption world in Korea is the practice since 2009 of the Baby Box. The Baby Box is basically a "safe" place where a mother can deposit her unwanted baby in a designated box, ring a bell and disappear knowing that she won't have to raise the baby but someone will take the baby in and give it a home. Adoptees who are blockaded from finding their birth parents because of Korean bureaucracy know that a paper trail to their mothers at least does exist but just can't be accessed. However, for the babies deposited in the Baby Box there is no trail and these babies who question who they really are at a later date will forever be frustrated by never knowing who their parents were ... not to mention the fact that a government which allows, in fact encourages, a mother to drop off her baby as she would a load of laundry is a government that needs to be censured and a practice that demands change.

Another point of harsh criticism is the Special Adoption Law (SAL). "Special" in English suggests something positive, something gratefully received or viewed, but there is nothing "special" about this hated new ruling. The Special Adoption Law is very new (sorry, don't know the initial year it was enacted) but it was underwent great revision in 2011 with amendments being enforced in Jan 2012. The law basically revised ruling on (1) Family Preservation, (2) Domestic Adoption, (3) Overseas Adoption, and (4) Institutional Care. ASK, TRACK, KoRoot, Gong-gam, KUMFA, and Mindullae represent the child in these new amendments and they are NOT happy with how the child is viewed as a commodity in the law and not treated as a citizen with equal rights. [Large argument, small space here, so I can't begin to give details.] They argue that the law is rife with contradictions, loop holes and possible arbitrary interpretation possibilities. As these groups stubble to access adoption records and reunite adoptee with birth families, the law does not facilitate nor support the adoptee and not even the unwed mothers and their children, which the law should be supporting so as not to create more adoptees in society. The law also supports the creation of a National Adoption Day which was established by the Ministry of Health and Welfare as May 11, starting in 2005.

Basically there is no conclusion to the problem as "orphan" children, who are not orphans but almost always have two living parents, are still being sent overseas or adopted domestically or being locked into an orphanage where they "live" until adulthood because they cannot be adopted as their parents, for whatever reason, will not sign them out of the orphanage giving permission for adoption. And so the battle continues ... there is no conclusion ...