@samuelszuchan: At 41, Adam Crapser sat next to the Korean mother he was told didn't exist, and learned his real name. It wasn't the name on any of his papers. He was born Shin Seong-hyeok. The file said Shin Song-hyeok. Somewhere between his mother in Yeongju and the plane to America, one vowel had changed, and the boy with it. He was three when he left Korea, adopted with his older sister into a Michigan family that kept them for seven years before giving them up to separate homes. At 12, Thomas Crapser and his wife took him in, and later, started beating him. When the Crapsers were arrested on abuse charges, he was put out of the house. By 16 he was living on the street, where he picked up the burglary record that would later make him deportable. No one had actually bothered to make him a US citizen. And in 2016, that record sent him back to Korea. See, by the 1980s, Korea was sending more children abroad than any country on earth, through a system called "proxy adoption." A couple in Minnesota or Copenhagen didn't need to travel or meet the child. A child registered as an orphan moved without friction. In the 1960s an agency received about $130 per child sent overseas, while Korea's GDP per person was about $106. And in March 2025, Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission confirmed agencies falsely recorded lost children as orphans. He sued Holt Children's Services and the Korean state in 2019, the first Korean adoptee ever to do so. In late 2022, his lawyer Kim Su-jeong read the closing argument in Seoul. Her voice broke on the first sentence. She had to stop twice to steady her breath. And when the court delivered its judgment, it referred to him by the altered name. It wrote "plaintiff Shin Song-hyeok." The file's version of him, carried all the way to the end.

Sam Szuchan

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Region: US

Thursday 30 July 2026 14:00:00 GMT