Mie Lee Hansen, now 38 years old and living in Denmark, thought she knew the story of her adoption and the family that gave her away. She had documents that offered convincing information about her Korean background, including the fact that she had two older sisters.
After taking a DNA test, she was reconnected with a Korean relative — but the story she learned from this long-lost relative differed radically from what was in those files.
“The real story is that when my mother went into labor, she was rushed to the hospital,” Lee said. “She gave birth, and after she recovered and requested to see her baby, she was told that the baby was stillborn. The day after my mother went home, my maternal grandmother returned to the hospital to claim my body. But the doctors told her to go home and became angry with her.”
Needless to say, her family was shocked to learn that she was very much alive.
“When my Korean family read my adoption file, they said, 'Everything here is fake.' The file had their names and the city we lived in, and it was true that I had two older sisters. But everything else was false. Birth parents never gave permission for me to be adopted. Somebody took their child. Somebody stole me,” Lee said.