Mixed-race daughter Korea tried to send away is now helping adoptees return home

Meeky Woo Flippen, head of 325KAMRA Korea, speaks during an interview with Hankook Ilbo at the organization’s office in Jung-gu, central Seoul. Korea Times photo by Park Ji-yeon

“578 Ganeung 3-dong, Uijeongbu, Gyeonggi Province. 3-tong, 2-ban,” she said in Korean.

Meeky Woo Flippen, now 60, still has that address etched into her memory after more than 50 years.

“My mother taught me the address when I was 5. ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she told me. ‘So if someone kidnaps you, make sure you come back here.’”

As she recalled, there had indeed been attempts to take her away. Whenever she returned home from school, a “lady” from Holt International waited for her around the corner.

“You can’t live here,” the woman told her. “In America, you can eat all the chocolate you want.”

She then seized Meeky by the hand and tried to drag her away. Meeky wrenched herself free and ran as fast as her legs could carry her. When she reached her doorstep, her mother rushed outside and roared.

“I told you I’m not sending my children away. Get lost!”

Meeky smiled as she recalled those memories of her childhood and her mother. She said the hurt of being jeered at as a “dirty Yankee girl” at school would fade whenever she took shelter behind her mother’s legs.

“It was a happy moment. We struggled and often had little to eat, but I was with my mother.”

Meeky was born in 1965 to a Korean mother and a Black American soldier stationed in Korea. She lived in Korea until she was 16, when she was adopted by a family in the United States.

At the time, the Korean government, guided by ideas of ethnic homogeneity and “pure blood,” pushed mixed-race children born to Korean women and U.S. servicemen out of the country. Whether they had families in Korea made little difference.

The practice amounted to blatant racial discrimination, state violence and a violation of children’s rights. Yet no comprehensive investigation has been conducted to this day.

That is why Meeky, who now heads 325KAMRA, a nonprofit organization that helps Korean adoptees overseas find their biological families through DNA matching, decided to bring the forced adoption of mixed-race children into public view.

Meeky Woo Flippen, left, poses with her mother, Ha Jeong-ok, in the backyard of their home in Uijeongbu, Gyeonggi Province, around 1968, when she was 3. Courtesy of Meeky Woo Flippen

‘Rainbow family’ torn apart by discrimination and poverty

"Rainbow familiy" was what people called Meeky's household of six children with different skin colors. Orginally her mother was married to a Korean man and had a son, they kicked her out while she was heavily pregnant because her due date coincided with that of the family’s eldest grandson.

She later met a white American soldier, and they had a son together, but he left Korea soon after the child was born. The blue-eyed, blond-haired boy was eventually adopted by a family in the United States through a church. The painful separation left her determined never to send any more of her children away for adoption, no matter how difficult life became.

With her third husband, a Black American soldier, she had three daughters and a son. Meeky was the youngest among them. Meeky said her mother ran a clothing shop near a U.S. military base and doted on her three surviving children after her eldest daughter died in childhood.

Meeky’s earliest memory was of gathering spent shell casings from a nearby stream when she was 2 or 3 years old. During the rainy season, the casings washed down from a U.S. military firing range, and she and her mother collected them to sell as scrap metal.

Meeky still vividly remembers picking up a rusty nail and her mother smiling as she said, “No, not that one.”

Meeky Woo Flippen, right, poses with her mother, Ha Jeong-ok, around 1973, when she was 8. Courtesy of Meeky Woo Flippen

But for a single mother raising three mixed-race children, poverty proved to be an inescapable trap. Meeky’s older sister was in the third grade when she said she wanted to be adopted by a family in the United States because she dreamed of eating as many green apples as she wanted.

Meeky recalled that her mother sobbed as her bright older daughter pleaded to be sent to America, but in the end, she let her go.

“Mother wrote a letter to the adoptive parents saying, ‘This is my precious child. Please let me know how she is doing,’ and slipped it into my sister’s suitcase,” Meeky said.

But the letters stopped coming after a few months. Her mother spent years agonizing over what had happened to her daughter, until word finally came that she had suffered abuse at the hands of her adoptive parents and had been removed from their home.

It was then that the mother who had endured so much finally broke down, overcome by anger, grief and helplessness. Her health deteriorated rapidly as she blamed herself for sending her daughter away. She died two years later, when Meeky was 14.

Meeky Woo Flippen, right, poses with her mother, Ha Jeong-ok, near their home around 1978, when she was 13, for a photograph submitted to the Pearl S. Buck Foundation. Courtesy of Meeky Woo Flippen

A nightmare inside a home meant to protect

The death of their only remaining parent left overseas adoption as the last viable option for Meeky and her older brother. A nun who knew her brother took them to St. Vincent’s Home, a Catholic child welfare and adoption facility in Incheon. The facility recorded Meeky as a year younger than she was to improve her chances of being adopted.

Her brother left for the United States first. From that moment on, Meeky was truly alone.

The experience at St. Vincent’s Home, according to Meeky, was a horrendous one. Whenever the priest returned drunk, he called the children to his room one by one. Each night, they huddled together and trembled in fear as they tried to sleep. Meeky said she longed to be adopted as soon as possible, but unlike her brother, she faced repeated delays. She was told, among other things, that her adoption documents had been lost in a flood.

The person who helped Meeky endure life there was Frances, a friend of her mother’s. Frances would often keep Meeky out of the priest’s sight by having her help care for newborn babies. Meeky said Frances was taking a risk of her own by defying the priest and protecting her, especially as Frances herself hoped to leave Korea.

At night Meeky slept beside the newborn babies. "It felt like being back in my mother’s room," she said.

Meeky Woo Flippen smiles during a visit to her mother Ha Jeong-ok’s grave in Gangwon Province. Courtesy of Meeky Woo Flippen

A resolve made at her mother’s grave

After two years there, she was adopted by an American family. Her adoptive father, a Korean War veteran, specifically wanted to adopt a Korean child, but her adoptive mother did not. Meeky went to work in the strawberry fields each day instead of attending school, to save money for a trip back to Korea to visit her mother's grave.

“When my mother died, the family of her first husband came to the hospital to say their final goodbyes. They told me not to attend the funeral, saying I was a source of shame to my mother,” Meeky said.

“I promised myself that one day I would visit my mom. Honestly, it still feels as though she died only a few days ago.”

At 17, Meeky boarded a flight to Korea. Standing before her mother’s grave, she found that no tears came. Instead, she resolved to build a happy life for herself.

With that resolve, she returned to the United States and built a life there. She went on to become a successful entrepreneur, working in fashion design, hair and beauty services, salon and spa management, and housing construction and development. She also built a family of her own, with a son and a 5-year-old granddaughter.

Meeky Woo Flippen, head of 325KAMRA Korea, collects DNA samples from members of a Korean clan association to help overseas adoptees find their biological families. Courtesy of 325KAMRA Korea

10,000 DNA samples, 1,000 family reunions

More than a decade ago, she became involved in supporting Korean adoptees overseas. A few years before retiring, she met Catherine Kim Bradtke, a mixed-race adoptee living in the Boston area, and helped found KAMRA. Confronting her own past of searching for family alone and without support, she wanted to spare others the same experience.

Meeky joined KAMRA’s board in 2019 and has led the organization since 2023.

Operating as nonprofit organization, KAMRA collects DNA data from Korean adoptees in countries including the United States and Canada through online and in-person networks and helps them find biological relatives. The organization produces and ships DNA kits and also visits Korean clan associations to collect genetic samples directly. Even when there is no direct match with a birth parent, KAMRA uses the percentage of shared DNA and family genealogies to trace people who may be related.

Over the past decade, KAMRA has collected more than 10,000 DNA samples and helped reunite more than 1,000 families. For adoptees whose records were falsified, altered or lost, leaving them with no clear path to their biological relatives, KAMRA has offered a new way forward.

“The service is completely free. At first, people were suspicious of us, but now even people in Korea willingly provide DNA samples once we explain that they can help reunite separated families,” Meeky said.

Meeky Woo Flippen, right, head of 325KAMRA Korea, poses after accepting the Prime Minister’s Commendation on behalf of KAMRA founder Catherine Kim at an Adoption Day ceremony on May 9. Courtesy of 325KAMRA Korea

KAMRA received the Prime Minister’s Commendation on Adoption Day this year, an unusual honor for a private nonprofit, as most previous recipients have been public institutions and researchers.

But Meeky said the recognition had brought her more concern than joy. A growing number of adoptees and biological relatives are refusing to meet even after finding one another, held back by misunderstandings and resentment that have built up over the years.

“Some parents begin searching for their children and feel happy and relieved when they learn they are doing well, but still do not reach out. For adoptees, that can feel as though their parents have abandoned them twice,” she said.

“The opposite also happens. Adoptees search for their biological parents and find them, only to discover that their records say they were abandoned rather than lost. Some then refuse to make contact, leaving their parents devastated. They are all victims of trauma.”

Above all, uncovering the truth is essential if those deep wounds are ever to heal.

In March this year, mixed-race adoptees, including members of KAMRA, filed a petition with Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission seeking an investigation into the forced adoption of mixed-race children. It marked the first such effort in more than six decades. Abuse at child welfare facilities has also been included in the scope of the investigation.

The number of Korean adoptees overseas is estimated at about 150,000. But mixed-race adoptees, many of whom were never even entered into family registries, face particular difficulty tracing their roots because records are missing, concealed or nonexistent, while some biological parents remain reluctant to come forward out of guilt.

Her eyes reddening with tears, Meeky said the state must formally apologize for discriminating against mixed-race children and forcibly sending them overseas for adoption. It must also place the truth on the historical record and make one thing clear to mixed-race adoptees around the world: that their mothers longed for them just as deeply as they longed for their mothers, and they were truly loved.

Meeky Woo Flippen, head of 325KAMRA Korea, speaks during an interview with the Hankook Ilbo. Korea Times photo by Park Ji-yeon

This article from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, is translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times.