Kristi Eikenes, one of Long Island's first Korean adoptees, reflects on the search for her birth family

In December 1963, the 1½-year-old girl who would become Kristi Eikenes was taken from an orphanage outside Seoul, South Korea, to her adoptive family’s home in Lindenhurst. “Not so pretty, a little too thin,” the orphanage records read. “Needs attention and love.”

Now 62, Eikenes, of Smithtown, has a clerical job with Stony Brook University Hospital, friends, a husband and three children she loves. Her life is “full,” she said, but she lives with a mystery: She does not know her biological family.

Eikenes returned this month from a trip to South Korea, her fourth. She made the trip with 36 other women who met on a Facebook page for Korean adoptees to experience a culture she has mostly known from afar, and because of a “secret wish” to find biological relatives.

The thin sheaf of records documenting her early life names her Hee Ok Chun and describes her as a “legal orphan abandoned by its parents.” Her guardian is named as Hyung Bok Kim, a staffer with the Holt Adoption Program, one of the agencies that pioneered American adoptions in Korea. But, like many Korean adoptees from that time, she knows little of her origins. The documents do not name her biological parents, list any relatives or home address, or say why she was placed for adoption.

She believes her biological parents may have been alive when they gave her up, as was the case for many South Korean children in the country’s impoverished years after 1953, when fighting ended in the Korean War.

Searching for clues about the past

An adopted child, even when grown, may have questions only her biological parents could answer. Eikenes knows what she would ask, she said in an interview after her trip. "Why?" followed by what she called “silly” questions: “Did you think of me … Did you wonder what I looked like? Because I wonder what you look like. Did you wonder if I was safe, did you wonder what my abilities were, or what kind of personality did I have? Was I difficult or was I easygoing?”

But this trip, like the others, ended without a reunion or any clues about her origins. She has found no relatives through websites including Ancestry.com and 23andMe.com, and when organizers of an earlier trip for adoptees arranged for their photographs and Korean names to be published in Korean newspapers, she got no inquiries.

“The later you were adopted, the more likely there would be sufficient information to at least make contact with a birth family member,” said Paul Kim, Holt International’s director of programs for Korea and Mongolia and son of Hyung Bok Kim. “For adoptees of Kristi’s generation, you just never know.”

Since 1953, close to 200,000 South Korean children have been placed into families overseas, with more than 100,000 into families in the United States, according to expert estimates and Korean government statistics.

Eleana Kim, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging,” said the adoption system in Korea in the '60s amounted to a surrogate welfare system. "The government put the burden for caring for dependents on the shoulder of households, or heads of households … It led a lot of people to a terrible decision: If there's no welfare support, and you can't feed a child, what do you do?"

Eikenes was likely among the first Korean children adopted on Long Island. Records from Holt show just 10 children placed with Long Island families before her. Local adoptions were rare enough that some drew newspaper coverage, hers included. A 1964 feature after her arrival ran under the headline “Kochs Adopt Korean Orphan.” 

Eikenes’ father, Harold Koch, was a Grumman engineer; her mother, Mildred Koch, was a homemaker. They were near 50, with three older biological children, when they adopted Eikenes. They decided to adopt after watching a presentation about the plight of Korean children by World Vision, a Christian relief organization, in their Plymouth Brethren church.

A 2009 study by the now-defunct Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute suggests adopted children, especially those adopted by families of a different race, benefit from “learning about one’s origins, whether by traveling to their birth country or by seeking out biological relatives in the U.S.” Researchers concluded that “there seems no question about the need to provide transracially adopted children with opportunities to be in diverse settings and have diverse role models.”

Eikenes remembers her parents, who have since died, as loving, good-hearted and sometimes fierce advocates for her and her younger brother, Gary, another Korean adoptee who served as a New York City police officer before dying, in 2018, of 9/11-related cancer. But they displayed no special interest in their children’s Asian heritage. Besides, most authorities on adoption at the time did not recommend dwelling on children’s roots, Kim said. 

With poverty and malnutrition still rampant in Korea, “The thought was that they had been adopted by the U.S., the richest and most wonderful country in the world, and the best thing to do is to help them become as Americanized as possible. … In the 1960s, that would have meant white America,” Kim said.

Growing up on Long Island

In 1960, there were only 1,136 people of Korean descent in all of New York State, and roughly 2,500 Asian people in Suffolk County, according to census data. Lindenhurst was almost entirely white, and Eikenes reached high school before she saw another Asian person in school.

Race-based teasing was merciless, she said. “Every day was just a constant being made fun of, whether by peers, teachers or other grown-ups. Every day someone had to make some sort of comment. You grew up wanting to be invisible, wanting to fit in, wanting to be just unnoticed.”

It did not help that her mother, a conservative woman who came of age in the Great Depression, sewed her dresses into middle school and, in high school, when the other girls wore designer jeans, gave her flared polyester pants. 

“I wished I had blonde hair and blue eyes,” Eikenes said. “I didn’t have anything that was a commodity that anybody wanted.”

Bittersweet trip

Eikenes has tried, tentatively, to reclaim some of her identity for herself: watching Korean dramas on Netflix, eating at a Korean restaurant in Stony Brook, and wearing a traditional hanbok dress to her daughter's wedding. She took Korean classes but stopped during the pandemic and has not resumed. 

If she found no definitive answers about her beginnings on her latest trip, she did fill in some of the margins. She met the orphanage doctor who probably would have examined her at intake and another adoptee who was old enough at the orphanage to remember a bit of it: “A lot of us still came out very thin,” Eikenes said she told her, “and the orphanage didn’t have a lot of food and resources.” 

The group caught a glimpse of North Korea across the Demilitarized Zone and visited the Holt orphanage, through which many of them had passed. In Seoul, they spent a day with orphans who had never been adopted. They will face enduring stigma surrounding adoption and orphanhood that Eikenes said would have been stronger decades ago.

Kim, the UC Irvine professor, said that stigma was real, but complicated by issues of class, gender, government policy and Korean law. 

For Eikenes, it is simpler: “Being adopted into the U.S. … is still the best thing that might have happened to me,” she said. “Being left in Korea, I don’t think my options would have been very good.”

She realized on this trip that if her parents were still living, they would likely be in their 80s or older. She may never have answers to her questions. But she is certain about one thing: 

“Giving up your child at birth, let alone at a year and a half — the amount of love you have for that child to survive has to be huge,” she said.

If she does ever meet her parents, there will be “ugly tears,” she said. She will tell them, “Thank you for giving me a future.”