hankyoreh

The baby photo taken of Anna Lycke before her adoption.

By Lim Ji-sun, staff reporter

“My name is Stefan Holm. I won a gold medal in high jump at the 2004 Athens Olympics, and I am a member of the International Olympics Committee (IOC). I am writing this on behalf of my wife Anna Lycke. My wife was born in Korea in 1973 and is currently looking for her birth parents.”

On the paper that Anna (Korean name Kim Ah-seon, 40) held out, her husband’s letter was translated into Korean. This was the consideration that her husband had shown for his wife, who wanted to go to South Korea by herself to search for her birth parents. It had in fact been her husband’s idea for Anna, who had lived in Sweden since being brought there from South Korea through adoption, to try to find her birth parents.

Anna, who cannot speak a word of Korean, met a Hankyoreh reporter in Seoul on June 11. “Thanks to my husband, I worked up the courage to come,” she said in English.

Anna was found in the Gireum neighborhood in Seoul on July 28, 1973, less than a week after she was born. Though she was left on a road in the scorching heat of mid-summer - when the daytime temperature soars as high as 31.9℃ - somehow, she was still alive.

Someone brought Anna to a police box in the neighborhood, and the police passed her along to Seoul Metropolitan Children’s Hospital. Nothing was known about the girl, not even her date of birth, and Seoul Family Court christened her Kim Ah-seon in Sept. 1973. The following year, she was adopted by a childless family in Sweden through the Social Welfare Society.

While Anna worked up the courage to come to South Korea, she had few leads. The document filled out at the police box did not even provide the identity of the person who had found her.

At the hospital, there was only a brief record that she had stayed there for a few days. “Since there was a record stating that I received treatment at the Hangang Sacred Heart Hospital for pneumonia, I found myself wondering whether I had been abandoned because I was sick,” Anna said.

But her facial expression remained unclouded. “I was adopted by good parents, and I am still thankful for that today,” she said.

After Anna was adopted, almost miraculously, her parents had a child. “My parents loved and cared for me and my younger brother in the same way.” But Anna also had some less pleasant memories. As a child, she was always disturbed when people would fawn over her fair-skinned, blue-eyed brother and call him “cute” but get quiet when they saw her dark skin.

“Here in South Korea, everyone looks the same as I do, and they start talking to me naturally in Korean. It’s really amazing,” Anna said.

After studying journalism at university, Anna became a reporter at a public radio broadcaster in Sweden. It was while she was interviewing sports stars that she met her current husband.

In regard to her husband, who is well-known as an athlete who began his career at the age of six and poured more than 20,000 hours into training, Anna said, “Until he retired in 2008, sports were the only thing he cared about.”

Anna said that she “gradually started thinking about her biological parents” after she got married, bore a son, and began raising him. Her son, who is now 10 years old, is studying Korean because of his mom.

Anna is both a cook who published a cookbook for children and a writer who wrote a children’s book called “Poop Trip.”

“Now that I have a child and am raising him, I find myself thinking from a parent’s perspective. How hard a time my parents must have had to feel that they had to get rid of me. Maybe they lost me and were worried sick about me. Whatever the case, I want to meet them,” she said.

Anna is planning to attend the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics with her husband, who is an IOC member. She dreams of meeting her Korean parents at that time.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]