By Carrie Moritz, Gazette

As far as Amanda Schotzko knew, she was given up for adoption because her birth mother couldn't afford to keep her. But in September of this year, that worldview was flipped upside down when a visit to Korea that could have provided answers to her birth family found that her "known history" was, potentially, a clerical error.

"My social worker said, we really don't know where you were born at," Schotzko said, recounting the visit. The social worker continued, she said, "'We know that you likely came to this facility, like the building that we're in right now, for a period of time, time before you went to your foster mother.' And I was like, 'Hold on, I have a question about that.'"

Schotzko, who has beautiful Korean features, dark hair, and a quiet but intelligent, plucky and ambitious way about her, was born in Korea in the mid 1980's, during a time of political unrest. It was ruled by a corrupt, military- and- authoritarian government, and pro-democracy protests were common. Women with children were often not allowed custody if they divorced their husbands, and baby girls were sent abroad for adoption much more often than baby boys. Over the course of five decades, over 200,000 babies were sent overseas, a record-setting diaspora that is now fighting to be heard.

Schotzko was one of those babies. She was adopted in 1984 by Dwayne "Jake" and Shirley "Chris" Jacobson, a well-known family in Garretson. Jake, who worked in sales, was Garretson's mayor and a city councilor for several years, and Chris was a teacher at the Garretson school for nearly three decades. They, with their 7-year-old son Matthew "Jake" Jacobson, brought Amanda home to Garretson when she was three and a half months old.

Schotzko said her dad tells the story very well, when asked what her parents' motivation may have been for adopting from overseas. Despite knowing they could have more children, something else called to them. 

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"They knew that they wanted to have more children. My dad saw an article in the Argus Leader, and it talked about international adoptions starting to ramp up in South Dakota. This is, you know, mid-'80's. He knew the people that were covered in the story, knew them somehow, through mutual friends or something like that. So he called them up and they went to go visit these people. And Dad tells the story like, very vividly. He was like, 'I rang the doorbell.' He was like, 'And these, three or four Korean children answered the door, and I was like- that's what we gotta do.'"

Schotzko grew up happily in Garretson, under the loving guidance of her family. She knew she was "different," but has always been accepted into the community without too many issues. Having a cultural connection to their home country or birth family wasn't expected or pursued in the 1980's and 1990's for adoptees, so Shotzko was raised like any other girl in Garretson and given more cultural ties to her parents' Scandanavian heritage than Korean.

"I grew up understanding that my birth parents had been in a relationship but weren't married, and that she just didn't have- they didn't have the means of which to take care of me, and she was no longer in the relationship with him," Schotzko explained. "Okay, that's what I grew up understanding, and I never really questioned that."

It wasn't until 2019 when she started to search in-depth for more answers about her birth family.

 "I didn't really think that birth search was even a possibility for a long time," she said. When she met another Korean adoptee who was undertaking their own search, Schotzko opted to do one of her own.

It's not a fast process, and much of it is done through regular mail, often with people who don't know English. Schotzko didn't know Korean.

Finally, a small bit of news came, and that was a connection to her birth mother. A woman had contacted the agency through a payphone, and said that the birth father had died prior to Schotzko's birth. Their relationship had not been approved by her birth mother's family, and she didn't want to connect directly to the daughter she had birthed.

"So I let that be. And just was like, when I go back to Korea, you know, like when I go back to Korea at some point in time, I'll try again," she said. At least she had some answers, she thought.

Before leaving for her first-ever visit to Korea this past September, Schotzko was excited. Even if she never found her birth family, she could experience the culture, see areas her family may have known, and learn the history while inside the country.

She was able to head to Korea through GOAL Korea, which she found through social media. GOAL means "Global Overseas Adoptees Link," and they approve the applications of approximately 15 adoptees per year. It offers an all-expenses-paid trip to the country (except airfare) and provides historical tours, cultural connections, time with the Korean arm of Child and Family Welfare Services, and a visit to birth family cities or villages (if known). Schotzko said they receive around 200-300 applications per year from around the world for the trip, called the "Motherland Tour". This time, the organization approved 30 applicants.

"The reason I've wanted to go, is just to connect with the culture," Schotzko reasoned. "It's very different than in the US. Yeah, completely different. There's a lot of things that I think you just can't learn about unless you go experience it yourself, right? Like the food and, just being, I hadn't been around 30 other Koreans my entire life, let alone 30 other Korean adoptees. So to walk around and feel like you just blend in with everybody else is a very different feeling that I've never had."

She wasn't truly expecting to receive more information on the trip about her birth family than she already had, but one of the days was a tour to Holt International Adoption Agency, which her parents had used. Holt is a Christian-based, international agency that states it provides care and support to vulnerable children around the world, but has not always been operated without scandals. 

While in Korea, adoptees were given time to do their own adoption records search. Schotzko described the Holt building as large, bright, and corporate.

Holt's post-adoption services building was a completely different story. 

"Post-adoption services is in a different building around the corner that's small, rundown, clinic-y feeling," she said. "You're like, okay, so priorities, right?"

However, while there, Schotzko was able to page through her record. That was when the social worker announced they didn't know where she had been born, and Schotzko's worldview went sideways. 

She had been told she was born in Cheongju, and was scheduled to visit the city the next day, but when the file was looked at carefully, they found a different case number on that page. 

It wasn't hers.

"I start looking through the file even more to be like, you know, are there other instances of this? And there weren't instances of the wrong file number, but there, you can clearly see that there are places where things are scratched out or whited out, or like that." She was told the agency would have to look further into it, but now, they didn't know the validity of her file.

"I thought I was either going to pass out or throw up, like, one of the two, because I was just so caught off guard," she recounted. Suddenly, a visit that could have provided answers to her history left her feeling like she was reeling on the edge of a cliff.

"It's hard to describe the feeling of everything that you thought you knew all of a sudden becomes like, it just turns your world upside down."

Unfortunately, Schotzko's is not the only known occurrence of this, and she's worried about how those records are going to be traced in the future.

"You hear the number of stories of that- records got switched, or that there were cases of like coercion, of trying to convince, you know, mothers and parents to give up their children, or that there were children that were snatched and stolen and put up for adoption," Schotzko said. 

The country is currently working on digitizing the adoptees' records, though it's a 5-person team and is low on the government's priority list. Knowing how those paper records might contain valuable clues, Schotzko doesn't want to see the paper records lost or destroyed.

DNA testing could be a source of help, but the ability to do that within the country is extremely limited for adoptees. Schotzko said that despite her file, she was rejected for that procedure.

"It shouldn't be that hard for us as adoptees to get things like our certificate of adoption, or be able to get like our, you know, have DNA testing done," she argued. "I think it calls into question everything, where you just go like nothing's off the table here."

Schotzko hopes there will be changes. South Korea established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2006, an effort that ended in 2010 and was resurrected in 2020 to look specifically into the 1960s-1980s. It will be publishing a report in May of 2025 that will outline and detail past human rights violations committed under its authoritarian regimes, including human trafficking, that led to the surge in overseas adoptions in the 1970's and 1980's.

According to the Associated Press, investigators found many falsified and manipulated records in 20,000 adoptees, enough that a one-year extension was granted in January 2024 for the release of its report detailing those issues.

"I think the hope is that they will have found enough evidence of those things that they will open it up again to future cases to be reviewed and investigated," Schotzko said.

Even if Schotzko never gets to meet her birth family, having some knowledge of them provides a sense of closure for adoptees.

"I feel extremely fortunate, you know, because I grew up in a very loving household and in a community that for the most part, I was easily accepted into," Schotzko pointed out. 

However, the sense of community she found in the group of adoptees was so strong that it was something she struggled to put into words.

"Me wanting to do a birth family search has nothing to do with that," she said, trying to explain that she still loves her adoptive family and her childhood. "I am trying to replace something or whatever, fill a void whatever, no. But I think every person wants to know kind of a little bit about, like, where they started from, like, what's their what's their beginning of their story."

She pointed out that she would like to share more of her cultural story with her two sons, Noah and Lukas. Despite being well-liked in the school, there aren't other students who "look" like them, and they've had experiences similar to her, where other kids, not understanding why they look "different," would mention something in a rude manner or pick on them.

Now that she's experienced Korea the country, she feels more comfortable connecting with Korean culture, and has been dabbling in making cultural foods such as kimchi. She is working on going to visit again, this time with her two boys and her husband, Nick.

"There's a lot of things that I kind of just miss," she pointed out. "It's a very different atmosphere. And there are just things about it that... it's very different than what you see in the US. It's overall very- every place that we went to was very clean, but there's not a trash can in sight. I'm not kidding you, like, if you get something, then you have... you just carried around with you for the rest of the day, because there's no trash cans."

Schotzko is becoming more integrated with the adoptee networks, hoping to bring to light the experiences of foreign adoptees and their attempts to uncover birth families. She will be speaking at the Korean American Adoptee Network (KAAN) Conference this spring about her experience.

Of the four adoptees who will be speaking, Schotzko said, "All of us felt like we were vastly underprepared to go into our file review session and then talk about what we feel like. As a community of adoptees, we should be advocating for it."

She would like to advocate for more DNA testing resources for adoptees, not only to help with finding immediate parental figures, but to locate any extended family they may have.

"I think about that sometimes," Schotzko said. "It throws me off, where I just go, I have a whole, like, there's a whole other family in Korea that exists that I don't know about, you know?"

She would like to also see more collective efforts towards adoptee rights, and a higher priority on the part of the Korean government to provide resources to help adoptees locate their birth families. For instance, the digitization of the paper records and how low it is on the priority list.

"If you're going to centralize all these documents, you gotta have a plan, there's a part of me that's very- it's all like, I almost had a little anxiety about going, I may never actually get to see the thing again. Like, I may never actually get to see my file, like, physical file again. I need to go back and look at it again, because now at least I have a clear mind of what I should be looking for. And how does that compare to with, like, the file that my parents have, right?"

Schotzko said that some adoptees don't even have clear, legal American citizenship, despite being brought onto American soil so many years ago.

"There was a law that went into place, and essentially, like, you were, like, citizenship by a proxy, so that you were able to be adopted," Schotzko pointed out. "And essentially, like, once you were adopted and landed in America, you were citizen, [but] my parents still had to go through a court process with me, and it was several years later. But there are adoptees who do not have citizenship, and there's been legislation that's been introduced that has not remedied some of that yet."

Despite her difficulties, Schotzko is still extremely grateful she was able to go to South Korea. She loves the connection she now has to her birth country, and points out that Garretson was a great place to be raised.

She said this is a great fun fact: "Blue dragons are very symbolic in Korea. They were used as a symbol of royalty and the king. This was a cool coincidence as Garretson is 1 of 2 schools in the U.S. that has the blue dragon as their mascot."