Rebecca Kimmel’s search for her roots had an unlikely ending: Tips for other Korean adoptees

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Rebecca Kimmel sat in a small room, stunned and speechless, staring at the baby photo she had just unearthed from her adoption file.

Something about the photo — the eyes, the ears, an uneasy feeling deep in her gut — confirmed what the Korean adoptee had long suspected: This baby was not her. And the stories she’d been told about herself were a lie. But then who was she? Who IS she?

Thousands of South Korean adoptees are looking to satisfy a raw, compelling urge that much of the world takes for granted: the search for identity. Like many of them, Kimmel has stumbled into a web of switched photos, made-up stories and false documents, all designed to erase the very identity she desperately wants to find.

These adoptees live with the consequences of a tacit partnership by the South Korean government, Western nations and adoption agencies that has supplied some 200,000 children to parents overseas, despite warnings of widespread fraud.

After a long search with many twists, Kimmel still doesn’t know who she is. But in the process, she arranged a reunion between a birth father and his twin daughters, who had been separated for decades.

Here are some steps Korean adoptees could take to learn more about their past:

Do birth family searches

Adoptees can first request information from their adoption agencies. If they don’t get results from agencies, they can contact the South Korean government’s National Center for the Rights of the Child as a second step.

Birth searches can take months and aren’t always successful. Less than a fifth of 15,000 adoptees who have asked the government for help with family searches since 2012 have managed to reunite with relatives, according to data obtained by AP. Failures are