hankyoreh

Luc Ponsonett, whose Korean name is Heo Dong-un and who was adopted to France in 1972 at the age of six, visited his homeland on July 11 to take part in a program provided by Holt Children’s Services for those who were adopted into overseas families. For Heo, 41, the program represents a door. “To walk the Korean streets, to eat Korean food and to speak the Korean language will open a door to return to the lost past,” Heo said.

He can’t remember the days before he was six years old. It seems that they were rubbed out by an eraser. “I was an abandoned child. It seems that I have erased the memories to evade fears that I may be abandoned again by my adoptive parents,” he says.

For Heo, South Korea was just another one of the countries which he had not visited, like China or Venezuela - up to now. In France, he has been “sufficiently happy” to the degree that he has not been anxious to know about his birth parents. But when he first realized that he and his adoptive parents were different in appearance, Heo said he sometimes grumbled that he wanted to have blond hair and blue eyes like them.

He suddenly began to anxious about his real parents last year. “Looking at my French wife and two daughters, I thought that I should know something about my roots to grow up into a bigger tree,” Heo said. At age 41, he is the oldest participant in the Holt program. Gyeong Jeong-ok, a Holt official, said, “Most of the participants in our program are people in their 20s. It is unusual for us to see a person over 40 looking for his parents.”

He has gotten a late start on looking for evidence of his past, and it is proving to be difficult. The last record regarding him in Korea states that he had been in Jungsaengwon orphanage in Daegu. Before the 1990s, biological parents did not have to formally relinquish their parental rights before an adoption took place and children who were abandoned like Heo could be sent to foreign countries without their consent. As a consequence, this is one reason why there are few records available. Moreover, Jungsaengwon no longer exists, making it even more difficult to find information about the past.


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