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The Age
18 hours ago
- General
- The Age
Secrets and lies as South Korea's adoptees search for belonging
What in the World, a free weekly newsletter from our foreign correspondents, is sent every Thursday. Below is an excerpt. Sign up to get the whole newsletter delivered to your inbox. Singapore: There is a word in Korean, sosokgam or 소속감, which means 'a sense of belonging'. For Carissa Smith, who was adopted from South Korea in 1985 and grew up on the NSW North Coast, it's something that has always been elusive. Instead, she has lived with a life-long feeling of dislocation and anguish. 'I always struggled with 'fitting in', like I have a hole inside of me,' she says. 'On my birthday, I would look at the moon and wonder whether my birth mother was looking at the same moon from Korea. I wondered if she missed me, I wondered if she loved me.' Last year, she travelled to Seoul, hoping to find clues about her birth family that would paint a fuller picture of her identity, and answer questions that her three young Australian-Korean children might have one day. It's a journey numerous Australian adoptees have made, which has taken them to the doors of the Eastern Social Welfare Society, the agency in Seoul that has facilitated the adoptions of some 3600 Korean children to Australia since 1978. It holds the files containing critical information about their past. Smith says she was ushered into a room where a staff member sat across from her holding a manila folder of her records, using a ruler and her hands to obscure large sections of it. 'I begged her to show me those bits, because I just wanted to try and find my birth mother,' she says.
Sydney Morning Herald
18 hours ago
- General
- Sydney Morning Herald
Secrets and lies as South Korea's adoptees search for belonging
What in the World, a free weekly newsletter from our foreign correspondents, is sent every Thursday. Below is an excerpt. Sign up to get the whole newsletter delivered to your inbox. Singapore: There is a word in Korean, sosokgam or 소속감, which means 'a sense of belonging'. For Carissa Smith, who was adopted from South Korea in 1985 and grew up on the NSW North Coast, it's something that has always been elusive. Instead, she has lived with a life-long feeling of dislocation and anguish. 'I always struggled with 'fitting in', like I have a hole inside of me,' she says. 'On my birthday, I would look at the moon and wonder whether my birth mother was looking at the same moon from Korea. I wondered if she missed me, I wondered if she loved me.' Last year, she travelled to Seoul, hoping to find clues about her birth family that would paint a fuller picture of her identity, and answer questions that her three young Australian-Korean children might have one day. It's a journey numerous Australian adoptees have made, which has taken them to the doors of the Eastern Social Welfare Society, the agency in Seoul that has facilitated the adoptions of some 3600 Korean children to Australia since 1978. It holds the files containing critical information about their past. Smith says she was ushered into a room where a staff member sat across from her holding a manila folder of her records, using a ruler and her hands to obscure large sections of it. 'I begged her to show me those bits, because I just wanted to try and find my birth mother,' she says.
Sydney Morning Herald
13-06-2025
- Politics
- Sydney Morning Herald
A tale of two cities on either side of a divided country
What in the World, a free weekly newsletter from our foreign correspondents, is sent every Thursday. Below is an excerpt. Sign up to get the whole newsletter delivered to your inbox. Los Angeles: Hello and Kumbaya from Los Angeles, where the sun shines every day, even if the streets don't. Earlier in the week, while jogging in Washington, DC, I was stopped by an older man from out of town who wanted to know if it was safe to be outside at that time of the evening. It was 7.30pm, still light outside, in one of the prettiest, leafiest parts of the nation's capital, Kalorama Heights. Granted, the streets were pretty quiet. But I assured the man it was safe. Still, in today's America, you can't blame him for asking. After all, I was about to jump on a flight bound for Los Angeles to cover the immigration protests that saw US President Donald Trump dispatch the National Guard and the Marines – picking a serious fight with the biggest state in the union and generating global headlines. And it's not just LA. Police clashed with protesters in San Francisco and Dallas, Texas, with more rallies likely as the Trump administration accelerates its plans for the biggest deportation program in US history. This week's events have turbocharged unease back in Australia – and around the world – about the United States under Trump. It is strongest among political progressives, who baulk at what they say is an authoritarian new order being ushered in by the president, but you can also detect it among the mainstream. The US in 2025? No, thanks. There's a hardness, an ugliness, a brutality and unfairness to Trump's United States that Australians especially might find distasteful. But at times like these, it's important to remember it's not all bad. The US is big enough to contain multitudes. While the protests in LA were turning violent, Washington was hosting WorldPride, the LGBTQ festival held every one of two years that, like the Olympics, travels the world from city to city. It was last hosted in 2023 in Sydney, and will head to Amsterdam next year.
The Age
13-06-2025
- Politics
- The Age
A tale of two cities on either side of a divided country
What in the World, a free weekly newsletter from our foreign correspondents, is sent every Thursday. Below is an excerpt. Sign up to get the whole newsletter delivered to your inbox. Los Angeles: Hello and Kumbaya from Los Angeles, where the sun shines every day, even if the streets don't. Earlier in the week, while jogging in Washington, DC, I was stopped by an older man from out of town who wanted to know if it was safe to be outside at that time of the evening. It was 7.30pm, still light outside, in one of the prettiest, leafiest parts of the nation's capital, Kalorama Heights. Granted, the streets were pretty quiet. But I assured the man it was safe. Still, in today's America, you can't blame him for asking. After all, I was about to jump on a flight bound for Los Angeles to cover the immigration protests that saw US President Donald Trump dispatch the National Guard and the Marines – picking a serious fight with the biggest state in the union and generating global headlines. And it's not just LA. Police clashed with protesters in San Francisco and Dallas, Texas, with more rallies likely as the Trump administration accelerates its plans for the biggest deportation program in US history. This week's events have turbocharged unease back in Australia – and around the world – about the United States under Trump. It is strongest among political progressives, who baulk at what they say is an authoritarian new order being ushered in by the president, but you can also detect it among the mainstream. The US in 2025? No, thanks. There's a hardness, an ugliness, a brutality and unfairness to Trump's United States that Australians especially might find distasteful. But at times like these, it's important to remember it's not all bad. The US is big enough to contain multitudes. While the protests in LA were turning violent, Washington was hosting WorldPride, the LGBTQ festival held every one of two years that, like the Olympics, travels the world from city to city. It was last hosted in 2023 in Sydney, and will head to Amsterdam next year.
The Age
30-05-2025
- The Age
Giant dolls, an empty theme park and semi-trailers: The tourist trap that's now a lifeline for Russia
What in the World, a free weekly newsletter from our foreign correspondents, is sent every Thursday. Below is an excerpt. Sign up to get the whole newsletter delivered to your inbox. Manzhouli: Visiting the Chinese border town of Manzhouli, on the remote fringe of the country's northeastern Inner Mongolia region, is like stepping into a 'made in China' Russian outpost. On the highway linking the small airport to the city, two enormous Matryoshka nesting dolls tower over the horizon, rising almost absurdly out of nothing but the vast, flat steppe that sweeps across the border into Russia. The dolls are actually hotels and connected to a Russian-themed amusement park featuring Kremlinesque buildings topped with brightly coloured onion domes and spires in a pastiche of Moscow's Red Square. Arriving at night, as my translator and I did earlier this month on a flight from Beijing, is to be treated to a glittering vision of the city, its skyline of Russian gothic and European-style buildings lit by golden lights after sundown each evening. The mystique abruptly ends about 9.30pm, when the town's facade plunges into darkness, as though a city official has pulled the cord on a giant electrical plug. Manzhouli in the harsh light of day is a hustling township on the 4209-kilometre border between China and Russia, near the juncture with Mongolia. Its identity is split between being a Russian-themed tourist trap for Chinese travellers, and its foremost purpose as China's largest land port and economic lifeline to Russia. The best place to witness this stark juxtaposition is in a dusty carpark near the border checkpoint, where dozens of Russian and Belarusian trucks are stationed each day waiting for customs clearance under the gaze of the Matryoshkas looming in the distance.
