Catherine Harned wrung her hands as she sat at DFW International Airport. Every minute that ticked past the scheduled arrival time seemed like hours. She told herself she’d go with the flow and wouldn’t let her nerves get to her.
The anxiety she tucked away for her drive from Tyler seemed to bubble up and seep through, only getting worse with each swoosh of the automatic sliding doors at the arrivals gate.
“She messaged me that she’s at customs, but she also said she’s going to the bathroom,” Harned said, swiping through her phone.
Wave after wave of passengers passed by, and just as a flood of travelers slowed to a trickle, Harned, 57, saw a familiar face.
“That’s her,” she said and paced toward Anna Samuelsson, 55.
As the two embraced, both said, “You’re my sister.”
“We’re not strangers,” Samuelsson said, shaking her head side-to-side in disbelief.
The sisters, born in South Korea and adopted by families from different countries, took entirely separate paths to their July reunion.
The two are among hundreds of thousands who have been adopted from the East Asian country since the 1950s, during and immediately after the Korean War.
In recent years there have been increased reports of South Korean adoptees reuniting with their biological family members. The search is often difficult, as access to their information is limited.
At first, the two women couldn’t stop seeing the similarities.
Both were previously married to men 18 years older than them. They have the same feet. Their granddaughters are both named Olivia and are 6 years old.
The experience of searching for biological family left Harned questioning many of the things she believed about her adoption and birth.
While the U.S. State Department says it’s “committed to ensuring that intercountry adoption to and from the United States is a viable option for children in need of permanency around the world,” some have questioned the practice.
South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is investigating domestic and overseas adoption agencies after hundreds of adoptees submitted complaints that they believe information related to their birth was lost or falsified.
Transnational adoptions from South Korea peaked in the 1970s and ‘80s, when the country was under military dictatorships, and was seen as a way to address social problems and to “deepen ties with the democratic West,” according to The Associated Press.
The Consulate of the Republic of Korea in Dallas disagreed with that notion in an email statement to The Dallas Morning News.
“No past government of the Republic of Korea has viewed the issue of adoptees in connection with international relations with other countries,” the consulate said.
Intercountry adoptions have declined worldwide after reaching a peak in 2004, according to the State Department.
They are most often “closed” adoptions, meaning the adoptive parents and child have no contact with the birth parents, according to the State Department.
“Because U.S. immigration law requires the legal relationship between a child and their birth parents to be severed, intercountry adoptions are typically closed,” a department spokesperson said. “The extent to which information about birth parents can be shared with adoptive parents varies based on the laws of the child’s country of origin.”
Stephanie Drenka, a South Korean adoptee who advocates for the rights of transnational adoptees, described the agencies that facilitate the adoptions as businesses.
Drenka said children’s interests are seldom put first.
“In many ways, the adoptees themselves become a product or a commodity, and our humanity and our right to information that other people take for granted is stripped of us in this process,” Drenka said.
None of that really mattered to Harned in July when she and Samuelsson agreed to meet in North Texas. Harned had spent her life learning to be content with the reality that the questions she had about her birth and adoption may never be answered.
Where was she born? Unclear, but her adoption papers say she’s from an orphanage in Jeonju. Where was she found? In an alleyway, abandoned by her parents. How did she get here? An American woman named Sue from a place called Texas adopted her.
“I’ve really never questioned it. I’ve just accepted that I’m here, and I moved forward. I’m truly blessed. I am who I am today because of what I went through in my 57 years of life, and I accept it,” she said.
Harned remembers arriving at DFW Airport in the summer of 1974 to the sound of camera shutters clicking in her face and people handing her presents and snacks. She also remembers regretting her decision to drink an entire bottle of Coca-Cola on the plane.
Newspaper clippings described the hurdles Harned’s adoptive mother, Sue, went through to bring her to the U.S. as a single person.
An article headlined “The transformation of Catherine” showed three photos of Harned. The captions described how “it took only a week” from the time she first met her adoptive mother to turn Harned’s face from a sad one into a “radiant glow.” A third shows her biting into a cob of corn at the Texas State Fair.
Harned said she felt sheltered growing up, protected and accepted by many of the congregants at First United Methodist Church, where her adoptive mother attended. Her summers were filled with ballet, camp and Girl Scouts.
As she reached adulthood, she picked up a habit that would haunt her.
She tried drugs for the first time around college — it was just for partying, she said. In her 30s, while living in Florida with an emotionally abusive husband, her habit turned into a full-blown addiction.
“It was like I didn’t care. I didn’t care. I just wanted to lose myself to never-never land and not worry about anything,” she said.
With the help of friends in Florida, Harned said she was able to dig herself out. A woman she referred to as her “Florida Mom” gave her interior decorating jobs and helped while Harned overcame her addiction.
“It took me a little while, but I took myself out of it, and I never returned to it,” she said.
When Harned got her citizenship in 1979, a newspaper quoted her mother saying, “Now she truly understands what it means to be an American citizen.”
Harned said the transition hasn’t always been easy.
“It’s not a fairy tale,” Harned said. “It really isn’t. I mean, I am thankful. I love my Mom, I do. It’s just been a roller coaster ride all my life.”
By 13, Samuelsson had come to terms with her past as an adoptee.
“I’ve always been very mature — whatever happened has happened, and I need to walk straight,” she said.
Samuelsson doesn’t remember much before her late teens, but said she was anything but sheltered. She said she grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Sweden, where she spent much of her time outdoors with dozens of kids.
“You could say it was a messy area. And since I am a tough person, I wasn’t afraid of anybody,” she said. “Nobody would bully anyone if I was around because I would stand in the middle and say, ‘Push me. Come on, bring it to me.’”
She described how she fought her fears of being abandoned by trying to overachieve in team sports.
“I needed to achieve more to feel that I’m OK, that I can be Swedish. They can’t get rid of me because I’m the best in the team. I’m the best in school, so they can’t abandon me because then they will look stupid,” she said.
Samuelsson works in the service and hospitality industry. She recently found a job as a restaurant manager in Denmark.
About 10 years ago, Samuelsson said, she got an email from the Swedish organization that managed her adoption telling her they had important information from Seoul and she should call them back in five days.
When she called the organization, a woman asked her to sit down.
“I was like, ‘No, I don’t need to sit down,’” Samuelsson recalled. “She was saying, ‘Are you interested in your roots?’ And I said, ‘No, I’m not interested in my roots.’ She was nagging me about this, and I finally said, ‘Could you please just let me know what is all this about?’”
When the woman told Samuelsson that her biological sister, who lives in South Korea, was searching for her, she screamed in excitement. Shortly after that, she arranged to meet the woman in South Korea.
The woman told Samuelsson that her father spoke shortly before his death about how his youngest daughter was put up for adoption. For two years, the woman went to different orphanages in South Korea to search for her sister, eventually finding paperwork that matched Samuelsson’s records.
Samuelsson said she demanded a DNA test to confirm the match, but she would have to wait until her trip to South Korea for the results. She still remembers the faces of the workers from the South Korean adoption organization who informed her of the findings.
“They had no poker face. I knew immediately that it was negative,” Samuelsson said.
After Harned left her abusive husband in Florida, she started a new life in Tyler. She stayed clean and got a job as an interior decorator. She loved nothing more than spending her mornings sipping on a cup of joe before tending to her garden at her home, where she lives with her partner, Ron, and Dallas, their 15-year-old mutt.
She fell into a deep depression after her adoptive mother, Sue, died in January 2023.
“Not having anybody in your life that has the same blood, it’s like a void,” Harned said.
Shortly after the anniversary of her mother’s death, Ron urged Harned to search for her roots and birth family. The couple had read a report in The News about 325KAMRA, an organization that matches South Korean adoptees through DNA testing.
About a month after Harned submitted her DNA sample, Samuelsson emailed Ron to say she was related to her.
Surely, it would take longer than a month, Harned recalled thinking. She thought it was a hoax or a cruel joke. That was until she looked up Samuelsson on Facebook.
“It was like staring at a mirror,” she said.
Samuelsson wasn’t distraught after learning the results of the DNA test that debunked her match with the woman in South Korea. She actually felt a sense of relief.
“I knew if I found my original family in Korea, I would have to take all my time again to learn a new culture, a new language, which I had already done for 40 years,” Samuelsson said. “And still in Sweden, I’m not Swedish. In Korea, I’ll never be Korean because I don’t speak the language.”
The experience led Samuelsson to believe her adoption papers were not her own, further obscuring her chances of being reunited with biological family members.
“We can’t access them because we don’t own them. We don’t own our own identity because the papers are owned by the adoption agencies,” she said.
Still, while Samuelsson let go of the idea that she found a biological sister, she was left with the thought someone could be searching for her.
“When I got this message that your sister is trying to find out, that was like, ‘Wow, maybe there is actually somebody who wants me, missing me, wondering about my life,’” Samuelsson said.
Samuelsson connected with more transnational adoptees from South Korea and researched the history of the practice. She went to South Korea six more times in search of answers. Many of those times, she met with other South Korean adoptees from different parts of the world.
She had almost given up hope on finding a match when, in June, she got an email from 325KAMRA that her DNA sample, which she submitted in 2016, matched a woman from Texas.
Plano resident Linda Rounds, president of 325KAMRA, said the organization has made more than 1,340 close matches, ranging from second to fifth cousins, and more than 140 immediate family matches involving siblings or parents. The group has also been involved in about 200 reunions.
“Full sibling matches are happening more often, but they are not as common as half-sibling matches,” Rounds said.
It took about five weeks from the time Harned submitted her DNA sample for the organization to return to her with a match.
“What took you so long?” Samuelsson recalled asking Harned on their first video call.
Samuelsson spent time in Plano with Harned and her family friends, Pat Welch and Ellen Baker. Both supported Harned through her reunion. Harned considers them her aunts.
The pair also traveled to Tyler, where Harned got to show Samuelsson her favorite pho spot, and Samuelsson cooked japchae the way she learned during her visits to South Korea.
Before Samuelsson left for Sweden, the sisters had dinner with other South Korean adoptees from the North Texas area. Over soju and Korean barbecue, Harned, Samuelsson and the other adoptees traded stories about their first time looking into their birth histories and the hurdles they ran into while looking for their parents. Harned intends to keep in touch with the adoptees group, which meets regularly in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
“This is so freeing because we don’t have to explain ourselves to the same questions that we’ve been asked over and over,” Samuelsson said.
Samuelsson, who is a mother, disagrees with the practice of transnational adoptions and said she hopes to see more done to give more rights to adoptees who want to learn about their history.
“It should be a fairy tale, but it’s not. You put that fairy tale on that child and bury all of their happiness, and for me, that’s the part of the equation that is so messed up,” she said.
Samuelsson’s last day of her visit went by quickly, Harned said.
The sisters still talk two to three times a week, mostly on the weekends. They are planning a trip to South Korea, where they plan to visit the orphanage listed in Harned’s adoption papers.
Harned doesn’t think she’ll be devastated if she doesn’t find the answers she’s looking for; she’s happy with her life. Although Harned isn’t as passionate about the issue as Samuelsson, she is interested in learning more about her family history alongside her sister.
“We’re going to try to find our story,” she said.
They don’t know where the road will lead them, but they will walk it together.
Staff researcher Spencer Bevis contributed to this report.