I learned of my secret adoption from a DNA test result the morning after my dad’s funeral

As soon as I sat on the chair, I regretted my decision to come into the office in Manhattan from Brooklyn. The funeral for Dad was less than 24 hours ago. Drained, I clicked aimlessly through emails until a subject line with cosmic implications stopped me: "Your DNA result is ready!"

Holding my breath, I clicked the link. Amidst a sea of colorful charts and numbers, I anxiously scanned for signs that would confirm my connection to Mom or Dad.

0% relation: no genetic connection to either. 

The screen blurred as I tried to process. Then it sank in. I am adopted.

For 43 years, I had grappled with this nagging feeling I wasn’t truly “a miracle baby” as I had been told. When Dad was diagnosed with a late stage lung cancer with not much time remaining, I knew I had to do something radical, like DNA testing.

Growing up in Korea, mostly with Mom, I was very observant as you might expect from an only child. I fancied myself a detective of sorts, collecting discrepancies and clues like Sherlock Holmes, my literary hero. As my collection of clues grew – the conspicuous absence of photos from Mom’s pregnancy or my first few months as a newborn, Mom’s cryptic message on a cassette tape, and her love swinging like a pendulum between tenderness and rage – I started to feel a hint of discomfort about my place in the family.

”Why are there no photos of you pregnant or me as a baby?” I’d ask, thumbing through family albums that meticulously recorded the rest of my childhood. 

Mom’s response always orbited around my divine arrival. “Did you know God sent you to me?” What did God have to do with the missing photos? 

I was about ten years old, very bored and home alone when I discovered a red tartan bag, hidden deep in the corner of a closet. Intrigued by its bulging shape, I opened the metal clasp to find a collection of old legal documents, handwritten letters, and a cassette tape. I turned the tape to see the label and it was dated around the time I had been an infant. I inserted the tape in a boombox while munching on snacks. When I heard Mom’s voice, I put my ears closer to the speaker. 

“Send Unha back!” she said, pleading through tears while talking about her failing marriage.

Back? Was there a place for me to go back to? Where would I go? Tears rolled down my cheek, overwhelmed by the inexplicable sadness.

Dad’s absence and his infidelities – open secrets in the family – were a source of deep shame and pain for Mom. This life she endured was not the one she had dreamed as a bright-eyed-22-year-old bride to a dashing 26-year-old young man. I could always feel her rage teetering right under her skin and she often let me know. “You dirty seed! If it weren’t for you!” Guilt ridden – though, vaguely understanding why –  I was determined to be a good daughter to make up for my sin.

To be good was to be loved. “I’ve always prayed for a useful daughter!” she'd say lovingly. I was filled with pride. Hungry for more of that warmth, I did everything to be the ultimate useful child. But it seemed it was never enough. "If only I had a son..." she lamented, making me feel like a big favor granted to her by God which she didn’t really want in the first place.

I was 15 when Mom and I moved to New York City to join Dad who had immigrated to the city a few years before. He had been sending letters to persuade Mom to give themselves another chance as a family. The move made everything harder, not the happy fantasy I'd hoped for as we prepared for our new American life. In a few years, I had escaped to Boston for college and they were suddenly on their own. Away from each other, our family dynamic continued to move like a broken rubik's cube.

With my family life the way it was, my future I imagined had never included a marriage or kids. So it surprised me when my adult life included what I considered blissfully “normal"; falling in love with my boyfriend Kenny, marrying him, and having two kids. A little family of my own felt like magic.

When I turned 41, I returned to Korea for a visit with Kenny and our children — it was their first and my first in 25 years. Has it really been that long? I walked through the old neighborhoods, suddenly feeling like a 10-year old all over again. 

I was also dying to ask a question that had been on my mind for decades. "Have you ever seen Mom pregnant? I’ve never come across any photos!" I casually mentioned this to my aunt during our last meal in Korea, expecting her to chuckle. Instead, she responded with silence, too stunned to speak. 

It was that moment that I knew there must be a secret that no one wanted me to see. 

Mom and Dad's eight-year fertility struggle, the backdrop to my "miracle" arrival, seeded my theory: I was born out of Dad's infidelity and Mom chose me, reluctantly, to raise me with not-so-subtle resentment. It was a wild speculation but It made sense. Skeptical of voluntary confessions from any family members, I ordered three DNA kits upon returning to NYC from Korea.

Getting closer to the truth seemed straightforward: spit in vials, send them off for the result! Instead, I panicked when the package arrived. What if it is true? I stashed the DNA kits away until one warm fall afternoon in Brooklyn when Dad had to be taken to an emergency room for mysterious relentless pain. “I’m sorry, it may be a late stage of lung cancer,” a staff doctor delivered the unexpected news. Dad was dying.

I stared at the DNA kits. Spit and send; two steps. Except I wasn’t sure how to ask without being asked why. I stalled as he got weaker. I got desperate; I had to think outside the box.

“My friends are starting a healthcare company. Just spit here and they will analyze them to create personalized vitamins. It’s fancy and very expensive. But it’s free for us!” 

My heart pounded as white lies flew out of my mouth. To my great relief, as soon as they heard the magic words — free and fancy — the samples were collected and mailed back to the lab. 

In less than a month, Dad passed away.

The discovery of my adoption shed light on a veiled past that was hard to see. It also felt like being thrown into fast moving waves, my entire life completely devoured by them.

Adopted. The word looped in my mind as I stared into the mirror. A face so familiar – my own face – seemed to be a stranger’s. I touched my nose, the one Mom joked it looked nothing like hers all my life. Whose face was this?

I had a million questions but I wasn't sure who to ask. Mom, who just lost her husband? Her siblings, who obviously were in the secret together for all these years? Bring Dad back from the dead, like you see in the movies? Oh, how I wished he would just show up in my dream and answer all my questions!

I thought of Mom’s college best friend in Los Angeles, whom I'd known my entire life. Guessing she might know something about my adoption, I contacted her.

“Oh, you found out,” she said on the call. “What do you want to know? I’ll try to tell you anything I can remember.” 

She knew all along from the very beginning. In fact, she had suggested the adoption to my parents and even accompanied Dad to meet me before the adoption was finalized.

“You were a cute baby,” she said, lovingly.

By the time I was ready to talk to Mom, three months had passed. I dreaded confronting her; I was afraid she might implode under the weight of the truth. I just wanted to protect her, a job I took seriously since I was a child.

“Mom, I need to talk to you.” I said, entering her room, silencing the TV, and sitting before her.

After making grand gestures of how much I loved her and reassuring nothing can change our mother and daughter bond, I ventured. “Am I adopted?” My voice trembled.

A prolonged silence followed, then a stare reminiscent of my aunt’s from a few years back.

She first denied, then lashed out in anger at my prying, and then fell silent. Then, we sat, knees touching, hands clasped, tears making it hard to see or speak. She eventually recounted the night I arrived.

Letting go of the 43-year-old secret, one Dad took to his grave, didn’t bring any relief but anguish. “It hurts too much.” So I stopped asking. With so many things unclear, the detective in me pressed on: Sherlock Holmes never gave up on a case.

“Expect nothing,” I reminded myself as I reached out to the Korean national adoption agency with a potential hospital name I was adopted from and my parents' details at the time.

A few days later, I was startled to receive a zip file with scanned, faded adoption documents from forty years ago. I gasped for air as I started to see the playback of my beginning for the very first time. 

A police report described a 2-month-old baby found in front of a house on an early August morning. I noticed the date coincided with the post-monsoon season. In those rainy months, a woman gave birth and clung to that baby before relinquishing it — a tragic ending for one family but a bright beginning for another.

When Mom decided to move back to Korea a year after Dad’s funeral, it seemed like a good idea. I imagined her speaking in Korean, chatting and laughing away with her siblings and old friends over coffee.

The first night in Korea, both of us were exhausted from the long journey and jet lag. After finishing a dinner prepared by her younger sister, Mom turned to me with a perplexed expression on her face and asked, “Who are you?”

My heart dropped. What was happening?

Her encroaching dementia, rather than becoming a nightmarish splinter, served as a bridge that united her siblings and me. No longer hampered by secrets and unspoken hurt, it opened us to a new kind of love as a family, embracing our roles as niece, uncle, aunt, and Mom.

Back in New York, with 14 hours between us, we now talk to each other on KakaoTalk, a popular Korean communication app. With the changing landscape of her brain, our conversations focus on simple joys and my family which she misses in NYC. When we speak, five minutes into the call, I repeat everything as if we had just got on the phone.

“Yes, the kids are healthy,” I sigh gently. I wait for her to say what she’s repeated all my life, that I’m useful.

“I love you because you’re my daughter,” she says, surprising me.

It's nice being simply me — a daughter. Hers.