Since the 1950s, South Korea has sent out over 200,000 of its citizens to be adopted to wealthy nations. Recently, a government investigation found this adoption system to have been corrupted by fraud and human-rights abuses (I was one of 56 petitioners whose adoption was found to have been in violation of human rights), President Lee Jae Myung offered a formal apology to Korean adoptees, and South Korea announced it would end all foreign adoptions.

While adoption is a popular trope in Western literature, it doesn’t seem to enjoy the same exposure in contemporary Korean fiction. In fact, the plight of the Korean adoptee barely registers with the Korean public, perhaps due to the shame of government-sanctioned family separation. Exporting children for economic gain belies Korea’s Confucian principles of the primacy of family, and yet for over seven decades, South Korea divested itself of its children without protest from its people.

Korea’s adoption story is also the story of South Korea, born of war, economic hardship, and American colonialism; flourishing through military dictatorships; and thriving on women’s labor while relegating them to an inferior status. South Korea has captured a worldwide audience with brilliant works that depict class inequality with movies like “Parasite” and the TV show “Squid Game”; the oppression of women, as in Cho Nam-Joo’s novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982; and the price of burying the past in works like We Do Not Part by Nobel Laureate Han Kang.

Adoption encompasses all of these subjects yet garners scant attention. But that may be changing. In 2025, I reviewed Cheon Seon-Ran’s terrific novel The Midnight Shift, featuring a Korean-adoptee vampire hunter. And now, Other Press has published Simple Heart by Cho Haejin, about an adoptee returning to Seoul to search for her origins.

Before being adopted to France at around 7 years old, Nana was rescued from the tracks in a busy Seoul train station by conductor Jung Woosik, who raises her for a year and calls her Munju. Now an adult, Nana accepts a proposal by a young Korean filmmaker, Seoyeong, to feature her in a documentary, “visiting the places you passed through in Korea before you were adopted in France; looking for people you came across; and finding out the meaning of your former name, Munju.”

The same day Nana receives Seoyeong’s proposal, she learns she’s pregnant. Though she doesn’t have a partner, she decides to keep the baby and name it Wooju, which means universe. Nana knows this because, conveniently for the plot, she never lost her ability to speak Korean.

In Seoul, Nana meets a taciturn and solitary woman, Bokhee, who owns an eponymous restaurant where she displays a photo of the mixed-race Korean girl she once fostered. Nana and Bokhee form a close connection. Meanwhile, Seoyeong and her crew search for Jung Woosik so he can solve the mystery of the name he gave Nana. Is she Munju, which means “dust,” or a homonym that means “door pillars”? For Nana, the answer is critical:

“All the memories of my firsts — the first word I said out loud, the inside of the first restaurant and hair salon I went to, what made me laugh or cry for the first time, and the first moment I knew what it was to be abandoned — they all belonged to Munju. For my history to begin, I had to know the meaning of Munju.”

She knows she had an existence before becoming Munju, but the pain of being abandoned on the train tracks, where she would’ve met her death if not for Jung Woosik applying his brake in time, makes her fear that her birth mother neglected and abused her. Besides, she’d previously visited Korea with an NGO that sought to reunite adoptees with family and was the only one of 15 participants who didn’t find hers.

When Bokhee suffers a stroke, Nana discovers her friend’s name is really Chu Yeonhee, and that she’d named her restaurant Bokhee for the foster daughter she relinquished. From a friendly Children’s Services clerk, Nana learns that Yeonhee has been leaving yearly letters to be sent to Bokhee, who was adopted to Belgium, and that, finally, a reply has come.

The real Bokhee flies to Korea when she learns her foster mother is in the hospital and shares her story with Nana. Born in a camptown to a military prostitute, Bokhee was taken in by Yeonhee after her mother died. Being in her old neighborhood brings Bokhee back to a childhood filled with abuse and discrimination for being half-Black; one particular incident compelled Yeonhee to give Bokhee up for adoption despite loving her like her own child.

The realization that Yeonhee relinquished Bokhee out of love — along with the discovery of an unknown detail of her own abandonment — causes Nana to rethink her own origin story, allowing her to regard her birth mother with newfound sympathy and compassion.

The novel’s translation by Jamie Chang captures the gauzy interiority of Nana’s first-person narration. Though she is deeply introspective, there is an interior disconnect that often transmits in Korean literature, as though the first-person narrator is telling a third-person story: a refusal, or inability, to plumb the depths of inner turmoil with the emotional rawness familiar to Western readers.

While I appreciate Cho Haejin’s inclusion of adoptees in Simple Heart, I was frustrated by the bending of facts to fit neatly into a heartfelt story of identity. Both of her main adoptee characters retain some language and strong memories of Korea. One of the travesties of intercountry adoption is the utter erasure of one’s cultural origins; most Korean adoptees are left bereft of language and culture, with even those adopted at an older age losing their native tongue once they’re assimilated into their new homes. (Ironically, Nana is bad at eating with chopsticks, which is the one skill that many adoptees are able to reclaim.)

In a random group of adoptees, the odds are astronomically low that 14 of 15 would somehow find their biological families during one short trip. Neither is there a Children’s Services department in South Korea as depicted here, with friendly clerks willing to skirt the rules. Further, military prostitutes did not go to public clinics but were required to regularly get checked for STDs at specially designated facilities. And so on.

It may seem needlessly nitpicky to point out small details the author gets wrong, but the accumulation of errors distorts the story from one of systemic injustice into a predictable, sentimental tale of an adoptee’s journey to revelation. There is enough of that drivel from white, Western authors. While I welcome the emerging awareness of adoption in Korean literature and culture, I hope future works will give the subject its due as a story of historic national importance.

Born in a Korean camptown to a military prostitute and an American soldier, Alice Stephens is the author of the novel Famous Adopted People. Her story was featured in the Frontline documentary “South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning.” Though South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s investigation into overseas adoption found that her human rights were violated, the law still denies her access to her mother’s identity.