Paperslip Co-Founder’s October 2021 Effort to Hold Holt and the NCRC Accountable at the National Assembly’s Annual Audit.

Posted to Paperslip on July 14th, 2025.

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In October 2021, with strong support from advocates in Korea, Paperslip’s Co-Founder (me) brought the case of a Korean birth father, Mr. Park, before the Korean National Assembly during its annual National Audit. The case exposed serious negligence by both Holt and the National Center for the Rights of the Child (NCRC), who had failed to reunite Mr. Park with his twin daughters — despite having had the means to do so at least 3 years earlier, in 2018. In Summer 2021, I helped administer a 23andMe DNA test to Mr. Park and his son in Korea, after locating Mr. Park independently — at my great financial, emotional, and temporal expense. This step was taken only after a long delay in response and an eventual denial from NCRC, which claimed not to have Mr. Park’s contact information. Meanwhile, Mr. Park’s twin daughters — adopted together through Holt and living in the U.S. — had already taken 23andMe in 2018. The DNA match ultimately led to their long-overdue reunion in 2021 virtually via Zoom, and in person in 2022 on Jeju Island.

SBS (Seoul Broadcasting System) released an excellent documentary about this case on December 24th, 2022 — however, the documentary put an overall positive spin on the reunion story, and omitted showing how we (myself, Mr. Park, and supporters in Korea — Mr. Park’s twin’s decided not to participate) took Mr. Park’s case to the National Assembly to criticize Holt and NCRC during the National Audit in October 2021.

Critically, this reunion could have taken place as early as 2018. Although NCRC had Mr. Park’s contact information, it falsely claimed otherwise. That same year, Mr. Park submitted a birth family search request through the Korean Adoption Services (KAS) website — where I later discovered it in 2020 in the process of my own birth family search involving my previously unknown twin sister. Even more troubling, the same Holt social worker met with both Mr. Park and his twin daughters just one month apart in 2018, yet failed to make the connection between them. Without the DNA test facilitated by me, Mr. Park may never have reunited with his daughters before his death. This case highlights the urgent need for accountability and systemic reform in international adoption and post-adoption services.

Below is the letter I prepared for presentation at the Korean National Assembly during the annual National Audit in October 2021. It was translated into Korean by local supporters and formally submitted through a Member of Parliament as part of the official proceedings. The letter was accompanied by a petition I had circulated amongst Adoptees to assess the performance of the NCRC. Responses from approximately 200 Adoptees were also hand-translated into Korean by dedicated supporters.

Please note: “Twin 1” shares the same American name as I do — likely the reason the Holt social worker friended “Twin 1” on Facebook and sent her a message to “check in,” just one day after I visited Mr. Park at his home in Jeju. While I didn’t know this at the time that I first met Mr. Park, this SAME Holt social worker had met the twins at Holt’s Seoul office in 2018, just one month after speaking with Mr. Park by phone. Despite the clear proximity of these interactions, she never facilitated a reunion. It would have been easy to identify Mr. Park’s twins, as they grew up with their real birth date — the one that Mr. Park kept repeating to me once I met him. This Holt social worker later retired without ever informing Mr. Park or the twins of her strong suspicion that they were biologically related. It was only after her retirement — and following the National Audit — that she admitted to the twins she had suspected the connection all along.

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October 18th, 2021:

“To The Korean Government, The Ministry of Health and Welfare, and NCRC:

My name is (Name Redacted), and I am a Korean American Adoptee. I have chosen to address the National Assembly due to my recent difficult experience of trying to track down one possible birth father, Mr. Park, whose posting about his search for his twin daughters I found on the KAS website in January 2021. My experience with Mr. Park has illuminated a systemic failure on the part of the Korean Government, The Ministry of Health and Welfare, and NCRC’s Birth Family Search office to adequately support the vital birth search efforts of a great many Overseas Adoptees like myself.

(Some parts of the letter redacted). To make my case even more complicated, in 2019, I had stumbled upon evidence that I might have been born with a twin sister, who likely died at my Korean adoption agency. My adoption agency still refuses to confirm that I…had a twin sister. Because of this failure on the part of my adoption agency to tell me the truth, I may never know my true identity, or the identity or fate of my likely twin sister.

Because Mr. Park had posted to the KAS website that he had relinquished twin daughters between 1973-1976, and I was born in 1975, and because I believe that I might have been born with a twin sister, I followed procedure for finding out Mr. Park’s contact information by contacting NCRC. After emailing the Birth Family Search office of NCRC for Mr. Park’s contact information in January 2021, I had to wait for 5 months for a reply, until June 2021. NCRC only replied to my email about Mr. Park due to pressure from several different Korean speaking advocates while I was physically in Korea between May-July 2021. NCRC’s answer after 5 months of agonized waiting was that NCRC supposedly had no contact information for Mr. Park. However, I later learned that Mr. Park had been in regular contact with both NCRC and Holt since 2018.

My successful efforts to find Mr. Park - without the help of NCRC - on Jeju Island this past Summer were documented by the SBS show “CuriousStoryY”, and our story aired in Korea nationally on July 9th. Thanks to SBS - not NCRC - I was able to fly with Mr. Park to Seoul to take 2 DNA tests. It was incredibly disappointing when it turned out that we were not a genetic match. However, I knew how determined that Mr. Park was to find his real twin daughters, so I arranged to have him and one of his sons take a 23 and Me DNA test, in order to give Mr. Park his best possible chance of finding his real twin daughters. Thanks to that test, I was able to locate Mr. Park’s real twin daughters less than one month later on 23 and Me. Mr. Park is now in (virtual) reunion with his real twin daughters, who have also met two of their birth brothers virtually.

While this may seem like a beautiful story - and in some aspects it is - the darker reality is that it cost me 5 months of agonized waiting for a reply from NCRC, and an expensive trip to Korea in the midst of the pandemic to chase down ONE possible birth parent match from the KAS website, who turned out not to be my birth father. Not only that, but now that I am in contact with Mr. Park and his real twin daughters, I realize that Holt should have reunited Mr. Park and his real twin daughters at least in 2018, if not before, and that both Holt and NCRC should have had Mr. Park’s contact information.

Without knowing it, both Mr. Park’s real twin daughters and Mr. Park have been in contact with the same Holt social worker since January 2018. Mr. Park’s real twin daughters visited Holt in 2018 to initiate a birth family search. They met with Holt social worker X, who told the twins that Holt Korea did not have their adoption file, and that only Holt US did. Holt social worker X did not provide the twins with meaningful information which would connect them with their birth family. Without Mr. Park’s real twins knowing, Mr. Park was also in contact by phone with Holt social worker X since 2018. He had been in contact with Holt social worker X about twice a month since their original meeting. I met Mr. Park on Jeju on June 29th, 2021. Mr. Park called Holt social worker X the day that I met him, but things were chaotic that day that I did not speak for long to her nor identify myself. I only discovered later, after finding Mr. Park’s real twins, that Holt social worker X had friended one of Mr. Park’s twin daughters, “Twin 1”, on Facebook just ONE day after I met Mr. Park on Jeju, On June 30th, 2021. Holt social worker X sent Twin 1 a message to “check in” that day, but Holt social worker X did not provide any information to Twin 1 about what was happening on Jeju. It’s likely that Holt social worker X was fishing for information from Twin 1, and trying to determine if Mr. Park’s real twins had found him on Jeju. (However, instead, it was me). I believe that this is clear evidence that Holt social worker X had knowledge of who Mr. Park’s real twins were. While we will never be able to prove what she did and did not know, I consider it a total failure on the part of Holt to communicate Mr. Park’s contact information to NCRC and a total failure of NCRC to make sure that they had Mr. Park’s contact information. It’s also obviously a total failure that neither Holt nor NCRC connected Mr. Park to his real twin daughters in 2018.

Mr. Park, who is not wealthy, additionally sent expensive boxes of tangerines as a gesture of thanks to both Holt social worker X and to the social worker who created his KAS post at NCRC. There is NO reason why NCRC should not have had Mr. Park’s contact information since 2018.

What is also disturbing is that Mr. Park’s KAS posting about looking for his twin daughters is still on the KAS website. This means that a future Adoptee could waste precious time, energy and money in a futile attempt to find Mr. Park as a potential birth father match. 

All told, this is a story of the failure of Holt to reunite birth families, and of the failure of Holt to communicate with NCRC, and of the failure of NCRC to share critical information with an Adoptee attempting to undertake a birth search in a timely manner. The worst aspect of these failures is that Mr. Park is 81 years old - and he could have been in reunion with his real twin daughters since at least 2018. Had Holt done its job and reunited the twins with their birth father, then I never would have had to have chased down Mr. Park on Jeju. Mr. Park could have passed away in the 5 months it took for NCRC to tell me that they did not have his contact information. All told, this is a story of Adoption Agencies, The Korean Government, The Ministry of Health and Welfare, and NCRC of utterly failing Overseas Adoptees and Korean birth parents alike. It makes me sick. 

As a result of my experience with Mr. Park, I conducted a survey of Overseas Adoptees’ experiences with NCRC called the “Performance Review of Korea's National Center for the Rights of the Child (NCRC) by Overseas Adoptees”. I received over 200 responses to the survey, which detailed many Adoptees’ collective frustrations of facing up to one year wait times for emails to NCRC. An equally important issue for Overseas Adoptees is dealing with the KAS website, which has not been significantly updated since 2016, and which is still based on outdated code which is not compatible with modern web browsers. This situation is still the case, despite the superficial KAS website graphics update of October 2021, which is insulting because nothing substantive in terms of the website’s functionality has been fixed. Adoptees must submit their Petition for Adoption Disclosure through the KAS website in order to initiate a Birth Family Search through NCRC, which has been well aware of the website’s problems since 2012.

I want to be clear that I hold the Korean Government and The Ministry of Health and Welfare directly responsible for the fact that I had to wait so long to receive a reply from the Birth Family Search office of NCRC. It is the Ministry of Health and Welfare which funds NCRC, and NCRC currently only has enough funding to hire between 1-3 Birth Family Search workers. I have recently learned that NCRC’s Birth Family Search office may be down to just 1-2 Birth Family Search workers. This is outrageous. With so few workers tasked with handling thousands of requests from Overseas Adoptees, it is no wonder that it can take up to one year for Overseas Adoptees to receive just one reply to their requests to NCRC. This is not the fault of the individual Birth Family Search workers – this is the fault of the Korean Government and of The Ministry of Health and Welfare. There is a clear need for the Korean Government and the Ministry of Health and Welfare to provide significantly more funding for NCRC’s Birth Family Search office, both to fund the hiring of an adequate number of Birth Family Search workers, and to finally and meaningfully update the outdated 2016 KAS website so that it is functional according to 2021/2022 web browser standards.

Please demonstrate to Korean Adoptees around the world, whose lives you distributed carelessly for cash, that you actually care about their welfare in the present. Please show your own people, Korean birth parents, that you actually care about the heartbreak which they have experienced in relinquishing their children to the international market in the wake of the Korean War, and during the rise of the Miracle on the Han River. Please show that you are better than a supposedly first world nation when it comes to human rights. We all deserve far more dignity than you have allowed us.  

October 18, 2021

Best Regards,

(Name Redacted)
USA”