Paperslip celebrates 50 reunions over exactly 5 years, from July 2021 to July 2026.
Paperslip’s Co-Founder looks back at Paperslip’s history — from 2020 to present.
Image credit: Unsplash.
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I recently shared the following good news:
Three KSS Adoptee birth family reunions unfold in Korea in June, in which Paperslip was involved.
Between July 2021 to July 2026, I have had a small role in the early stages of the reunions of 48 KSS Adoptees with their birth families in Korea, and in the reunion of a pair of Holt twins (who were adopted together) with their birth father in Korea. This brings the total number of reunions in which I have played a small role within that time frame to 50 reunions in five years of time.
(Please note that I do not count among this number those non-KSS Korean Adoptees whom I have helped to reunite by tracking down their birth relatives on social media. To date, that has been around 3 Korean Adoptees. (1.) In 2024, I found the birth father of a female US Holt Adoptee on Facebook — they later reunited in Korea. (2.) In 2025, I also found the biological sister of a US male Korean Adoptee on Facebook and was able to offer Facebook trick suggestions which successfully allowed these biological Adoptee siblings to connect and reunite. The biological sister had not seen her Facebook messages, and I figured out a way to *make* her see them. (3.) In 2026, I was able to track down on Facebook the likely biological half-sibling of a female US Korean Adoptee. The last name of the US Adoptee’s likely half-sister — a Korean Norwegian Adoptee — had changed, making her difficult to find directly. My sleuthing led to the discovery of the Norwegian Adoptee’s Facebook profile, which allowed the likely biological Adoptee half-siblings to connect and reunite. Having been involved in birth family search in my own and others’ cases for nearly a decade — I have become VERY good at detective work).
I am very proud of these accomplishments, though I of course wish that reunions like this were more common, and that I could fully effectuate all of them on my own. I also wish that reaching this number had not come at the cost of so many hundreds of other KSS Adoptees’ unsuccessful searches for their birth families. Unfortunately, birth family search is often luck of the draw — with the success or failure of search outcomes (at least in terms of the paper trail search) often dependent on scraps of information which were often recorded inaccurately decades ago. This makes the success rate of birth family reunion incredibly low. However, reunion is certainly not impossible, as Paperslip has demonstrated over time.
I co-founded Paperslip.org in 2020, but Paperslip was not a public site until January 2021. We (myself and Paperslip’s other co-founder, herself also a US KSS Adoptee) kept the site as a password protected site in the early days, out of fear that KSS would retaliate by our sharing information with KSS Adoptees. It’s actually indescribable how much anxiety I felt about first making Paperslip public in January 2021. Such is the sh*tty nature of a Korean Adoptee’s relationship with her or his Korean Adoption Agency. As Adoptees, we are often in perpetual fear of what the Agencies will do to try to harm us, should we have the audacity to try to obtain our own information from them. Now that KSS has effectively ceased Post Adoption Services (as of July 19th, 2025, when all former Korean Adoption Agency files, including those of KSS, were transferred to NCRC), I have essentially little concern about what is shared here on Paperslip with KSS Adoptees.
In July 2021, myself and one other anonymous KSS Adoptee accidentally figured out how to request and obtain the formerly secret KSS document which I quickly coined as the “Korean Adoptive Child Study Summary” — this is not a direct translation of the Hanja or Hangul document name, but we realized in 2021 that this is what KSS colloquially referred to it as. I also coined the term “English Adoptive Child Study Summary” in the same year (2021) to differentiate these two types of important KSS documents.
The important difference is that while the “English Adoptive Child Study Summary” often (though not always) orphanized a child by saying that she or he was “abandoned” and found with a “paper-slip” or “memo” in their “clothing(s)” (sic), and had “unknown parents”, the formerly secret “Korean Adoptive Child Study Summary” often (though not always) contained more information about a child’s origins — such as their birth parent/s’ name/s and birthdate/s. Other tidbits about birth clinic or hospital names were also sometimes contained in the “Korean Adoptive Child Study Summary”, which were often not contained in the English version.
The information from the “Korean Adoptive Child Study Summary” was rarely shared by KSS with Adoptees or their adoptive parents — though some KSS Adoptees DO have birth parent information in their “English Adoptive Child Study Summary” documents. Each KSS Adoptee’s case is different, and an Adoptee should be careful to NOT assume anything about their documents without CAREFULLY READING them — something which Adoptees often don’t do, even if they have access to them. This is partly due to the highly effective gaslighting by KSS of so many KSS Adoptees, who for decades naturally believe the copy / paste story of their being “abandoned” with “unknown parents”, and having been found with a “paper-slip” or “memo”, or having been found at a “police station”. So many KSS Adoptees grew up believing this often false orphanization story because this is what their English adoption documents so often said. But of course, as we now know, orphanization — the systematic erasure of a child’s true history — was just a means to move children efficiently out of S. Korea for overseas adoption.
From July 2021 forward, I have effectively acted as an unpaid and unofficial “KSS social worker” for KSS Adoptees in the US, Netherlands, Denmark, and Switzerland. I certainly NEVER represented KSS itself! By filling in the significant gaps of understanding of KSS Adoptees about not only their adoption paperwork, but also about the history of KSS and the KSS adoption process, I was spending thousands of volunteer hours attempting to de-gaslight and educate hundreds of KSS Adoptees about some of the more real possibilities in their adoption histories. I helped hundreds of KSS Adoptees to request and obtain their formerly secret “Korean Adoptive Child Study Summary” from KSS.
Throughout this time, I was in constant fear that KSS would STOP sharing this document — and later, as the file transfer to NCRC on July 19th, 2025 approached, I feared that this and other KSS documents may not be transferred to NCRC. I visited NCRC’s Temporary Storage Facility in March 2026 to personally make sure that certain KSS documents had been transferred to NCRC. While physical documents such as the “Korean Adoptive Child Study Summary” and the previously unobtainable 국내소속서류작성의뢰서 / “Request Form for Preparation of Domestic Affiliation Documents” WERE transferred to NCRC, many digital documents were NOT.
To convince a KSS Adoptee that there might be important information in their “Korean Adoptive Child Study Summary” and then to walk them through the process of requesting their documents was never a job I was paid to do. I’m not a “trauma-informed therapist”, and the emotional weight of this work has at times been extremely heavy.
It is for many reasons — including the emotional overload — that I can no longer offer to work with individual KSS Adoptees for free. Chief among the reasons is now that all former KSS files have been transferred to NCRC, the process is far more complex than the KSS process was — particularly for those who wish to visit NCRC’s TWO locations in person in Korea. Instead of offering free one-on-one advice as I used to, I have poured thousands more hours into keeping Paperslip updated to reflect the new NCRC changes, including creating a new page, called ALL ADOPTEES START HERE! FAQ + SITE NAVIGATION to help KSS and ALL Korean Adoptees navigate the process of the Petition for Adoption Information Disclosure request process through NCRC via the KAS website. Now that I have done MY volunteer work of creating this content — it is up to individual Adoptees to READ it. For those who wish to be walked through the process individually, I offer paid consultations which are described below.
I now offer one-on-one private Zoom consultations for KSS and ALL Korean Adoptees — though frankly, not enough people take advantage of them. I already know a few KSS Adoptees who have attempted to go through the NCRC process on their own without officially consulting me, who unfortunately came back from Korea empty handed — without a copy their former KSS file. It’s tragic to me that so many Korean Adoptees will fall victim to the deliberately difficult to navigate minefield of the NCRC process. But Adoptees typically expect everything for free, and often end up paying thousands of dollars for repeated trips to Korea to try the whole birth family search process repeatedly. It’s hard to watch, because NCRC’s process is deliberately designed to make Adoptees fail in their efforts at birth family search. If I am honest, I just wish that people would READ about the NCRC process here on Paperslip BEFORE they book that highly expen$ive trip to Korea!
It gives me no joy to see Adoptees come away empty-handed in their birth family search attempts simply because they weren't properly educated about the NCRC process.
As a KSS Adoptee, I've had to return to Korea repeatedly over the course of nearly a decade in pursuit of answers — not only in my own case, but also in the separate case of my deceased twin sister. That journey has cost me THOUSAND$ of dollars, money that — believe me — the Korean Government has been more than happy to collect.
And for any Korean Adoptee who buys into Korean Government support of the whole DoKAD movement — believe me, the Korean Government can’t wait for Korean Adoptees to die off, and be replaced by the less-interested-in-birth-family-search-progeny of Korean Adoptees. But sure, feel free to buy into that Korean Government sponsored distraction.
Everything I do on Paperslip is driven by one goal: to help other Adoptees avoid the same expensive, exhausting, and emotionally painful path that I was forced to navigate.
For anyone who believes that Paperslip makes beaucoup bucks through our unpaid volunteer work, that is pretty laughable. For those who know better what it has cost me personally to run this site and to have guided the KSS Adoptee community for nearly a decade, you all know the truth.
A GoFundMe for Paperslip wasn’t started until 2024, by which time I had already done years of free work. This was often very difficult work emotionally, given that each KSS Adoptee has had a different experience in life and a different understanding of her or his adoption history — and a different way of coping with hard truths. While only a few KSS Adoptees have taken their frustrations out on me personally, it is impossible not to feel the weight of an Adoptee’s sorrow when discussing their personal case with them.
Adoptees are no different than anyone else in not liking to discover that they may have been lied to their entire lives — and that in many of their cases, much of their social welfare history from Korea may have been heavily falsified. As a KSS Adoptee myself, realizing at the age of 43 in 2017 that all of my background information was likely false was certainly no picnic. And I have spent many nights receiving messages at all hours from points all over the globe, as some KSS Adoptees have come out of the fog…one…message…at…a…time. More than one KSS Adoptee has had a reunion after I have either walked them out of “the fog” or directly reunited them with birth family, and then proceeded to ghost me, because they were so overwhelmed by their emotions. If you are in the birth family search and reunion game, you had better have a thick skin — or you will not survive this process.
All of this having been said, it has been a tremendous 6 years since Paperslip’s founding in 2020. I am deeply grateful to the KSS Adoptee community which has given me so much. I know for certain that I have given a tremendous amount to the community in return.
Here’s to the future of Paperslip.org. If you believe in our mission, feel free to support us.
Search long and prosper.