Survivor of abusive facility searches for lost Korean roots

SEOUL, South Korea — The earliest photo Joo-Rei Mathieson has of herself was taken when she was about 4. Her head is shaved, her eyes cast downward. She has just arrived at perhaps the worst place a child could be sent in South Korea.

The black-and-white mugshot is from a November 1982 Brothers Home intake document that describes Mathieson as a lost street kid brought in by police. It notes that she’s “capable of labor” — chillingly for a government-sponsored vagrants’ facility that survivors have told The Associated Press often worked children to death.

She spoke no words for days, the document says, after entering Brothers, a now-destroyed facility in the southern port city of Busan where thousands of children and adults — most of whom were grabbed off the streets — were enslaved and often killed, raped and beaten in the 1970s and 1980s.

“She was so scared and traumatized,” Mathieson said of herself, as she imagined in an AP interview the feelings of the girl in the photo who’d been given the name Hwang Joo Rei, because of the Jurye-dong district where Brothers once stood.

Mathieson was one of the lucky ones. In August 1983, she and 21 other young children from Brothers were transferred to an orphanage in another part of the city. Her escape may have been made possible because of overcrowding at the Brothers’ sprawling compound.

Mathieson then slipped into an international adoption system that separated thousands of Korean children from their families as part of a lucrative business under the military governments that ruled South Korea from the 1960s to the late 1980s.

She was given an approximate birth date and other arbitrary details to accommodate a haphazard immigration process that was designed to send more children abroad as fast as possible. Mathieson was then flown to meet her Canadian adoptive parents in November 1984, becoming part of a child export frenzy that created the world’s largest diaspora of adoptees.

Mathieson…