Is anyone there? Our author was abandoned in South Korea as a baby and later adopted in Germany. For decades she didn't know any blood relatives. Then she started looking. By Miriam Stein

Miriam, what star sign are you?

No idea.

Why not?

Because I don't know when and where I was born.

Whaaat? Not even the day?

Nope.

But...how does that happen?

Because I was adopted from South Korea and don't know my biological parents, my place of birth, my birthday, let alone the time.

I have conversations like this all the time. When it comes to star signs or when the person I'm talking to doesn't think my name matches my Asian face. Like a superhero, I have my own "origin story" that I tell over and over again: When I was a few weeks old, my biological mother abandoned me in the South Korean city of Daegu. According to the few papers that came with me from South Korea to Germany, I was found by a policeman and taken to an orphanage. Apparently I then lived for a few months with an unknown foster mother. All that remains from this short life are the few meaningless documents, a baby photo and the two-piece white pajamas with bears that I was wearing when I was found.

On November 8, 1977, my documented German life began at Frankfurt Airport, recorded in official papers, but above all in family stories, on vacation photos, in school notebooks that I still have today. Korea and my biological parents disappeared completely from my everyday life, but of course not from my face and my genes.

I was officially named - Miriam Stein - after the sister of the biblical Moses. This Miriam was not abandoned; she made sure that her abandoned brother was found by the Pharaoh's daughter and thus saved him from death. My adoptive parents were devout Christians. Before they adopted me, they had two biological children, my brother and my sister. Our parents expressly wanted to adopt a third child as an act of charity, according to Matthew 18: "Whoever welcomes a child in my name welcomes me."

I don't think they were aware that the story of a rescue could lead to a lifelong dependency. For a long time, their perspective was the only relevant one. Reinforced by prominent adoptive mothers like Mia Farrow and Angelina Jolie, it was considered a good deed to give a "child in need" a home. But something was missing: most families had little interest in the culture that had given them up or in coming to terms with the process of saying goodbye.

Many adoptees like me are now middle-aged and also report ambivalent life experiences. I agree. In Germany, I am seen as Asian, in Korea people are surprised that I don't speak the language and don't understand the customs. I learned this immediately when I flew to South Korea for the first time in 2006 and went looking for clues there - without success. Why had my parents given me away? How would my life have turned out if I had stayed in Korea? Like so many adoptees, I tried to find some certainties. I traveled to Seoul and Daegu, looked at the sparse files and visited the orphanage where I was housed for a few weeks. Everything ended in dead ends. The only certainty I got was that there was no certainty.

A daring idea

At the time, I was already working as a journalist and writing a book about the trip, Berlin – Seoul – Berlin. After the publication, the documentary theater collective Rimini Protokoll contacted me. Together we put together a theater evening. The directors suggested continuing the research – into my genes, a daring idea at the time. Just two years earlier, in 2006, the biotech company 23andMe had started decoding genes commercially. One of the founders of the start-up was Anne Wojcicki, who was married at the time to Google founder Sergey Brin. To me, it all sounded like science fiction, dreamed up in Silicon Valley. Wojcicki announced a new era of consumer-friendly genetic diagnostics that could both prevent disease and reunite families – an initially boastful promise, because there was nowhere near enough genetic material in 23andMe's database to be able to compare it seriously.

The test cost 1,000 euros, paid for from our set design budget. I spat into a tube and sent the saliva to California for sequencing. I was able to access the results online a few weeks later: My risk of prostate cancer was "slightly increased," they said - that didn't worry me too much, as a woman without a prostate. Nothing about my fathers, nothing about my place of origin. Nevertheless, I kept my 23andMe password and years later even downloaded the app. Every few months I checked to see if anything had changed, because over the years diagnostics became more precise and genetic comparison material more diverse. And then, in December 2022, I received a push notification with a gift from advanced biotechnology: 23andMe had found a first cousin.

What do you do with it? Do you open the gift or leave it lying there – because how could a stranger enrich your life now?

The author and her cousin Jason Patten at their first meeting. © Erli Grünzweil for DIE ZEIT

According to the analysis, my cousin and I shared 13.4 percent of our individual DNA. That's quite a lot; parents and their children, as well as siblings, are 50 percent genetically similar. At least in the tiny part that is individual: 99.9 percent of human genetic material is identical, only one per thousand makes a person unique. We are not only distantly related to other people, by the way; our DNA is 98.7 percent the same as that of bonobos and chimpanzees. Even 90 percent of a rat's genes have a counterpart in human DNA. Ultimately, all life has far more in common than it separates.

My cousin, I learned from 23andMe, is called Jason and lives in Minneapolis. I was able to write him a message using the app's messenger:

Hello, my name is Miriam, I am 45 years old and a Korean-German adoptee. I don't know my biological parents. Are you also of Korean descent? 23andMe claims that you are my first cousin - is that possible?

I didn't get an answer.

It is human nature to seek a sense of belonging. Being part of a tribe increased our ancestors' chances of survival. In a sense, we humans still belong to tribes today: a so-called haplogroup can be found in every cell, a kind of code of our ancestral history that connects us with the original clans from which we emerged. There are haplogroups inherited via the paternal and maternal ancestral lines; my maternal group is called B4a1c1 and goes back to a woman who is said to have lived in Central Asia 17,500 years ago.

DNA tests today cost just over 100 euros and are very popular. In 2022, the industry generated 1.5 billion US dollars with "ancestry tests", 17 percent of which in Europe. Sales are expected to grow by 17.3 percent by 2031. The start-up 23andMe has become a market leader, with 14 million people worldwide having their genes decoded. Experts debate how "scientific" the tests are, but this deters only a few seekers. Journalist and chemist Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim warned in her ZDF program MaiThink X of an "end of genetic privacy"; providers like 23andMe used the tests to collect DNA data for which they actually have to pay: If this trend continues, soon no DNA will be anonymous anymore.

Diffuse longing for my homeland

No matter how grounded I feel in everyday life, a residual uncertainty never leaves me. At least once a week I dream that I can't find my way home because a bus breaks down or a ticket app doesn't work or the road simply disappears. Sometimes I suddenly remember what I didn't manage to do on my last visit to Korea, what I didn't eat and what I did n't bring back, as if you could make up for more than 40 years of homesickness in one trip. Then I am overcome by a deep, diffuse longing for a homeland that I have only visited a few times, whose history I can only read about in English and German, and whose culture I only understand with subtitles.

This longing for a natural and unconditional sense of belonging remains unfulfilled; I find it neither here nor there, despite all the love and connection I have with my adoptive family and German culture. When my adoptive mother died a few years ago, the undertaker asked me exactly what my relationship to my family was. I am mourning the loss of my biological parents, whom I never met. Family therapist Pauline Boss calls this feeling ambiguous loss , and by this she means "a relationship disorder caused by the lack of facts related to the loss of a loved one." According to Boss, ambiguous loss is insoluble. You can only learn to live with it.

At the end of May 2023, I got a message on Instagram from a woman named Tami: "Are you the Miriam Stein that Jason Patten contacted on 23andMe?" A little later, the push notification from 23andMe followed: "A relative messaged you." It was from Jason:

Wow, that's pretty crazy... I don't know my parents either. Yes, I'm adopted Korean. I guess this "23andMe" is pretty accurate?! How great to meet a close relative - I never thought that was possible!

Me neither! Especially not based on a genetic test that was done 15 years ago. I have a blood relative in Minnesota! Does he look like me? When I look at my adopted siblings' children, I see several generations in their faces - Grandma's high forehead, my sister's blue eyes, our mother's hair. Does my cousin Jason share traits with me? What do we have in common, other than 13.4 percent of our individual genes?

At least that's the dilemma we were born into. In the 1960s and 1970s, South Korea was one of the poorest countries. From reports by missionaries, development workers and correspondents, potential adoptive parents in the Western world learned of thousands of abandoned children who faced a bleak future of factory work and poverty. International adoption seemed like a sensible solution. 200,000 children were placed in Western families - and continue to be so today, even though South Korea is now one of the richest industrial nations and has the lowest birth rate in the world.

Most of the children were placed with families in Sweden, France, Germany and the USA, and like me they do not know their birth parents or their birth dates. All children were registered with a processing number at the orphanage, "K77 – 2178" is mine, so I was probably child number 2,178 given up for adoption in 1977. The birth name on my Korean passport, "Park, Yung Min", the official birth date, April 5, 1977, and the birthplace, Seoul, are fabricated in order to issue an internationally recognized travel document. My Korean records state that I was found on July 7, 1977 at an intersection in Daegu. My adoptive family, however, told me that I was in a "shoebox wrapped in newspaper" in Seoul. I guess none of the stories are true.

I have a cousin

What's true, at least according to 23andMe, is that I have a cousin named Jason. My whole life spent trying to find out where I came from led me to dead ends, and now I was suddenly able to meet my only known relative - didn't I have to? But how do you convey that to someone you just met via push notifications without sounding completely crazy?

You can combine it with a business trip, for example. A trip to New York was planned for an article that had been planned for a long time, and from there I could make a detour to Minneapolis - it was very simple, I wrote to Tami, Jason's wife, as I now knew. She replied a few days later: "We would love to meet you. When would you come? We'll block off a weekend."

A few weeks before the trip, she contacted me again and asked about my expectations. I had none. I was just curious - how would it feel? Would Jason and I feel any connection? "I just want to get to know you and have a good time with you," I wrote back.

In September I boarded a plane in New York and flew across the Great Lakes, Lake Erie and Lake Michigan, which lay like blue inland seas between the endless green and yellow fields - a total of almost 2,000 kilometers and an entire time zone. Minneapolis is a "twin city"; on the other side of the Mississippi lies its sister city St. Paul, the capital of Minnesota. I had never been to the "Twin Cities" before.

Before our blind date, I took a walk along the Mississippi River; the late summer evening sun dramatically colored the brick buildings that once milled the grain of the Midwest red. When I had almost reached the restaurant, I recognized Jason and Tami from a distance because they looked exactly like they did in Tami's Instagram photos: a red-haired woman with milky white skin and freckles, next to an Asian man with a friendly face. Of course, I had googled both of them and found out that Jason works as a strategic planner for a health insurance company and Tami is an engineer. The two have three teenage children, two sons and a daughter. In the last few meters to Jason and Tami, I changed shoes: I took off my worn-out sneakers and swapped them for a pair of ballet flats, as if I were transforming from an orphan into a cousin.

"So good to finally meet you!" Tami called out. After almost exactly half a lifetime. "We are so happy to be making contact with Jason's Korean family!" By Korean family she meant me.

At the table, I looked at Jason and tried to recognize his face, but I didn't recognize anything. Were his eyes my father's too? My grandfather's? On the 23andMe app, I could see his maternal haplogroup: M10a2. His mother is from a different clan, so we probably have the same paternal grandparents. Apparently, two siblings from one family had abandoned their children.

"Do you think we look alike?" I asked.

Tami narrowed her eyes and looked at us. "Not really. I'll take a photo of you, then you can see for yourself." We moved closer together and then examined the picture - no one saw any similarities.

Jason said he was found in Seoul in 1975. Like me, he grew up in an all-white environment.

"Have you ever tried to find your parents?" I asked.

" No. It is what it is, you can't change things."

His adoptive family is a colorful mix

Jason's family consists of two younger sisters, a younger brother and an older sister, who is also adopted. His adoptive mother died young; he calls the woman his father married after her death "Mom". None of these five children have the same mother and father, either due to adoption or divorce or remarriage - his adoptive family is a mixed bag .

"How was your first trip to Korea?" Tami wanted to know.

"It was strange. While I was waiting in line for the airport bus, she was reflected in the window of a building," I said. "When I looked at the reflection, I couldn't find myself because I looked like everyone else. For a split second, I disappeared into the crowd."

"I know that," said Jason. "When I was in Beijing for the first time, I washed my face in the evening in my hotel room. I grabbed a towel, dried my face and looked in the mirror. Then it hit me - I look like the people on the street!"

Jason and I neither drank alcohol that night, we preferred the spicier dishes and would probably be characterized as reserved but not introverted. Were these characteristics influenced by the 13.4 percent? Or was it upbringing? Was it even possible to say?

At some point we started talking about the peculiarities of the state of Minnesota. The people here are considered to be the nicest in the USA, according to Jason, Minnesota-nice. Maybe that's why this state has taken in the most adoptees in the whole country. Four other adopted children went to high school with Jason.

After dinner, he and Tami drove me back to the hotel, a few blocks through the deserted downtown. As we were saying goodbye, I realized we hadn't taken a picture with Tami, so I asked a woman in the lobby to take a picture of the three of us for a family photo. Tami put her arm around me, and it felt like a branch of the family tree was being repaired.

As we said goodbye, Jason hugged me and said, "I can't believe you really came!"

A few weeks later I received a message from Tami:

Thank you for your courage in taking the first step. It's crazy how similar your stories began and how differently they developed. We are grateful to have gotten to know you. Let's stay in touch.

She also sent photos of sporting events and her daughter's student dorm. I sent vacation photos of myself, my husband and our son. A few days ago I received a photo from my son's birthday, snapshots from a distant everyday life.

I still don't have an answer to the question of when and where I was born or who my parents were. I have adoptive parents and two adoptive siblings, each of whom has two children. I have a husband and a son who grew up in Berlin among a horde of our friends' children. And I have a biological cousin. He lives in the north of the USA with his own family; he is the chief strategist for a private health insurance company. He likes spicy food, loves films and is Minnesota-nice in his dealings. Where there is a cousin, there is also an uncle and an aunt, a grandma and a grandpa. They are out there. Sounds crazy, but now I can feel them.