MARRIT KIM VAN DER STAAIJ

Traces of Freckles

Back to the country that found my mother abandoned.

Traces of Freckles is a deeply personal memoir about longing and searching for roots in the country where my mother once was found abandoned. It reflects on how adoption leaves traces rooted through generations.

At fifteen, I found myself repeating my mother’s history. Surviving life. Fighting the same darkness she had fought, and afraid our stories would end the same way. When my mother died, I also lost my connection to Korea. The adoption cut off her Korean roots, while she was expected to blossom in the Netherlands. I grew up knowing what it meant to be Dutch, but never truly understood what it meant to be Korean. I returned to the country that once found my mother abandoned. For three years I immersed myself in the Korean life: a home, friends, work, language, and food. Only to find out that it was the other way around. Korea had abandoned her.

My mother is just one of the over 200,000 intercountry Korean adoptees. Her fight was not unique, research found that adoptees are four times more likely to die by suicide.

When adoptees are sent out of their home country, no one considers that one day they could have children themselves, who are also Korean. Yet here we are. Most of us are very young, or still to be born, but the first wave of descendants of adoptees are adults. We call ourselves Descendants of Korean Adoptees (DoKADs) and this is the story of one of them.