Korean adoptees, public TV and public radio collaborate in a Twin Cities broadcast event | By Martha Vickery (Fall 2025)
The complex topic of deliberately falsified information in many Korean adoptees’ adoption files will be the subject of a free live broadcast event happening November 11 in St. Paul.
A South Korean government announcement about the false records dating back decades was issued this spring and included an apology for the widespread fraud. The high incidence of falsified records means that it will (or has been) very difficult or impossible for affected adult Korean adoptees to find their birth families.
The forum, to be held Tuesday, November 11, 6 p.m. at Arbeiter Brewing Company in Minneapolis, is part of a series of live community discussions for the Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) program North Star Journey Live, designed as dialogues from underrepresented communities. The November 11 event is a special collaboration of Twin Cities Public Television (TPT) and MPR. The general public is invited to the event (tickets required), which is titled Mistaken: Minnesota’s Korean Adoptees Grapple with Confessed Systemic Corruption.
The program, which will be live on radio and re-broadcast later as a daytime radio program, will feature four speakers and a host, reporter Kaomi Lee, who is also a Korean adoptee. Lee is usually covering stories about Minnesotans outside the Twin Cities for the weekly local news show Almanac on TPT. She was asked to host this forum, not only because she is a member of the group being discussed, but also because she is knowledgable about the topic.
The show’s MPR producer, Kelly Gordon, is married to a Korean adoptee. In addition to the North Star Journey Live series, Gordon also produces the Big Books and Bold Ideas series, featuring live book author talks, as well as the Minnesota Now radio program.
Gordon explained that North Star Journey Live began in 2020 during the pandemic, using remote zoom call discussions designed to invite community dialogue during a time when people were isolated. Once they could hold live events, the program continued with in-person forums such as A Post-George Floyd Reflection, when the former police chief and others discussed individual and community healing and rebuilding after Floyd’s public murder by Minneapolis police; and the FRONDO at the State Fair, a live event that brought together the Hmong and Black cultures of the Frogtown and Rondo neighborhoods (i.e., FRONDO), for a community discussion.
The panel speakers for the next North Star Journey Live event (all Korean adoptees) include: Ami Nafzger, president of AdopteeHub, which reaches out to adult Korean adoptees with social and self-care programming and birth family searches; Cameron Lee Small, a therapist who works in adoption literacy and counsels adoptees and their families; Matt McNiff, director of the Camp Choson summer Korean culture camp; and Mary Niedermeyer, the CEO of the non-profit organization Communities Advancing Prosperity for Immigrants (CAPI).
A recent announcement after years of build-up
Many adult adoptees have known for years, at least anecdotally, that Korean adoptees frequently found significant errors in their own adoption files. A PBS Frontline TV documentary (South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning), first broadcast in September 2024, documented and described in detail the systemic neglect and abuse of the adoption system in South Korea, and the fact that other countries with programs to adopt Korean children failed to scrutinize these programs for signs of fraud, and in some cases, simply looked the other way.
The TV film documentary was a collaboration of the Associated Press (AP) and PBS, and was possible due to years of reporting and research work by AP reporter Tong-hyung Kim. It was nominated for Peabody and Emmy awards, and was conferred the 2025 Osborn Elliott Journalism Prize and two Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards for its in-depth reporting on systemic corruption.
A few months after the broadcast of South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning, on March 25, 2025, the South Korean government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) admitted its own system was culpable in fabricating or falsifying adoption records, and it issued a public apology. The statement came after a nearly three-year investigation by the TRC, which examined more than 350 files submitted voluntarily to its investigation by Korean adoptees from many countries. Of those, the TRC reported that 56 contained falsifications that rose to the level of human rights violations. The other 311 cases were each deficient in some way, but were set aside due to lack of time.
Every major news resource nationally and internationally reported on this revelation, after which social media posts by Korean adoptees and allies proliferated. Although many Korean adoptees had known for years about the false records, others in the community were in shock at the revelation.
Minnesota producer takes on the story
Gordon said the idea for the program came when she was asked by a (Korean adoptee) manager of one of the TPT stations, if they could do a program about this issue, which affects many Minnesotan Korean adoptees, particularly older ones, since the files were falsified mainly in the ‘70s and ‘80s. After research and many talks with community members, Gordon assembled a panel who are all Korean adoptees and who had expertise on the topic. She said Lee was a “natural fit” to be the host.
The level of knowledge is uneven in the community among the general public and adoptees, Lee explained, which makes an event like this a way to get out some basic information to Korean adoptees and a mixed public audience on a very complex topic.
For some adoptees, Lee said, the Frontline documentary “may have been the first time they had even heard that there could be some falsification of records and that their story of their file may not be the true story.” The documentary brought the story to a much wider audience than it had had in the past, “including some adoptees who haven’t been connected or haven’t done much searching, so I think it was quite shocking for a lot of people,” Lee said.
In recent weeks, there have been other developments, including that the new South Korean president made his own apology for the falsified adoption records in a speech on October 1.
The timing is one factor that has pushed this issue of accountability, in South Korea and in their own communities internationally. An important part of the timing is the age of the affected population of adoptees. Adoption is a “lifelong issue,” Lee said, that changes through one’s lifetime as one is aging.
An interest in their roots
Lee said that she has seen others going through a later-in-life type of coming out as an adoptee, “and developing interest in their roots and in family connections.” There are also many with aging adoptive parents, becoming caregivers and when adoptive parents die, wondering if that is another kind of abandonment. “It opens up some new things. If adoptive parents are no longer with you, you are alone in the world again, which may be triggering. That’s one thing that may come up for adoptees as they age.”
Lee found out in recent years that her own adoption records are probably fraudulent. Listed as abandoned on the records she saw, she said that there was no statement in the file about who brought her to the orphanage, there was no consent for relinquishment, no record of the police being called, and no record of an attempt to locate family. She does not know if any of the information is true; because it was so sparse, she suspects it was fabricated.
A shoddy transfer of agency records
The revelation about false adoption records, combined with a more recent controversy regarding the transfer of all adoption records from individual agencies to the South Korean government both caused confusion and distrust among adoptees. “There was a lot of anger over a decision to store the records in some kind of suburban storage facility that was not even archival quality,” Lee said. “It feels like once again, our records are not being treated with care and adoptees themselves are not being treated with care. Again, that we are not deserving of that kind of respect for our own lives that others receive.”
After much protesting by adoptees, and media attention about the records storage in recent months, Lee said “we learned that the records are now slated for storage at the national archives where they should have been all along.”
Concerning the records debacle, Lee said, many question remain about “whether agencies got rid of records of things they may have been liable for” prior to the mandated transfer, she said. “That is the accountability factor that adoptees are still looking for.”
The first resettled Asians
Minnesota is a place where “most people went to school with an adoptee, is married to an adoptee” or there is some family, neighborhood, or workplace connection, in metropolitan areas as well as the most remote rural areas, Lee observed. “We have really embedded ourselves in the culture here. And as a group we were really the first Asians to be resettled here. But because we came as children and not as family units, it made our immigration story very different.”
Korean adoptees, at least until recent years, were “kind of a silent group,” Lee said, but it is an interesting immigration story that so far has not been well explored, she said.
However, Korean adoptees have increasingly become been more active and more vocal. They have taken on the burden of self-advocacy and the movement has gathered strength. They have also been doing the work, arguably, that governments should have done, in securing their rights to their own records. “We adoptees have been the ones doing the research and putting the pieces together,” Lee said. In South Korea, several groups of European Korean adoptees have taken their grievances about adoption records to the court system, asking judges to decide whether their human rights have been violated.
An event with a dual purpose
According to Gordon, the program serves a dual purpose as a gathering place where people can discuss with one another and hear speakers, and as a radio broadcast that a wider audience can enjoy. It will also be taped for use as a Youtube video and posted after the event, she said. “The people in the audience will be primarily Korean adoptees, but we are taping it to play to the tens of thousands of listeners on Minnesota Public Radio,” she said, “and I’m guessing since Minnesota has the largest concentration of Korean adoptees in the U.S., I think everybody in Minnesota probably knows somebody who is a Korean adoptee …I am trying to make sure we are talking to this audience as well.”
Bringing up important questions
Lee said that for adoptees, the event will consider questions unique to the international adoptee identity. Adoptees are a diverse group, and ideas about justice and fairness to adoptees will vary, she said, “But I really think that having our records truly open to us is the kind of accountability everyone all agree on,” Lee remarked.
There are many layers of human rights violations to correct, “the rush to send us away for profit, and the shoddy paperwork and the falsified stories, names and identities. And just the very active hiding of identities and the paper trail, and non-transparency. These kinds of things are the abuses adoptees have had to endure,” said Lee.
Although at this point in her life, Lee said she is skeptical as to whether accountability will happen, she believes that a sincere attempt at amends and truth-telling by the South Korean government can help adoptees emotionally. “I do think that if the government would release our records, that would go a long way in making things right and restoring justice to us.”
Lee said, that for the adoptee audience, she hopes the event will spark some questions that adoptees must ask themselves about the current revelation. “It’s human nature and as you go through life and you’re middle-aged and older, you start to think about what did your life mean, and your purpose in life, and your adoption and why it happened, and the family you might not know about.”
Considering this issue on the records fiasco in South Korea, Lee said she is curious to ask fellow Korean adoptees questions like “What does justice look like for you? Is this something you need to know before you die?” And “Do you think it will help you in your own healing?”
Tickets for North Star Journey Live Mistaken: Minnesota’s Korean Adoptees Grapple with Confessed Systemic Corruption are at this link.
