How “Broker” and “Return to Seoul” reveal hard truths about Korean adoption

By Jae-Ha Kim
Mashable
February 16, 2023

In an unusual cinematic coincidence, two critically acclaimed films about South Korean adoption were released in December depicting different sides of the adoption story. Broker focuses on a teenage girl who leaves her infant at a church’s safe haven baby box, while Return to Seoul tells the story of a French woman who reunites with her birth family just days after arriving in Korea. To better understand how these films speak to real-life adoptees, I talked to Korean academics, human rights experts, and adoptees.

Adoption as a plot device is common in Korean television shows, where many characters have abandonment backstories. But in those K-dramas spearheaded by South Korean creatives, the storylines tend to have a nationalistic stance, depicting adult adoptees who are quick to forgive their birth moms (Oh My Venus) or intercountry adoptees who return to Korea and experience minimal culture shock and no language issues (Her Private Life).

With these two new films, non-Korean filmmakers present their visions of Korea’s controversial and complicated history with adoption, which includes more than 200,000 South Korean children who have been sent overseas since 1953. In 1985, the country sent nearly 9,000 children to predominantly white couples in the United States, Australia, and Europe. (Of the 10,000 foreign children adopted annually by U.S. parents, 60 percent hailed from South Korea.)

While preparing to host the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, the South Korean government worked with adoption agencies to clean up its image as baby exporters by limiting the number of children sent overseas until after the Games were completed. This false impression that the country was taking care of its most vulnerable citizens didn’t address any substantial socio-economic changes to solve the underlying issues of why impoverished parents and single women couldn’t raise their own babies. Rather, this temporary solution was to offset criticism by Western journalists like Bryant Gumbel, who said, “Though the Koreans enjoy showing off their country to the world during these Games, there are some aspects of their society they’d prefer we’d not examine so closely, and one of those concerns the exportation of Korean orphans for adoption abroad.”

What does Return to Seoul get right about Korean adoption?

Cambodian-French director Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul focuses on an adult adoptee who takes a two-week trip to South Korea, where she is reunited with her guilt-ridden birth family. First-time actor Park Ji-Min is a revelation in her portrayal of the Korean adoptee Freddie, who is burdened by her overly clingy Korean family that desperately wants to create a happily-ever-after scenario that simply isn’t possible for her. They think her life — a life they know nothing about — will be better if she moves to Korea. Having her close to them will absolve some of their guilt for sending her away. But they’re not thinking about what is best for her.

“Return to Seoul is a film that I know many Korean adoptees can really relate to,” says Karlstad University researcher Tobias Hübinette, a Korean adoptee who studies cultural representation of adoption and adoptees related to Korea. “The way Park Ji-Min plays Freddie has been praised by adoptees themselves. Her self-destructive and sad character resonates with many real Korean adoptees’ lives.”

Unlike many K-dramas in which intercountry adoptees return to Korea and quickly adapt to Korean culture, Freddie bristles when she is instructed to do things the Korean way. After she is told it’s customary for friends to pour one another’s drinks, she defiantly pours her own. When she meets her sobbing birth family, she doesn’t shed tears politely along with them. Rather, she’s shell-shocked at what she is witnessing and unsure of her own feelings toward this group of strangers.

“All in all, Return to Seoul is perhaps the best feature film so far about a Korean adoptee in a Western country returning to Korea,” Hübinette continued, “including the lead character’s interactions with the South Koreans that she encounters, her dealings with the adoption agency, and her meetings with her birth parents.”

What Broker gets right — and wrong — about adoption as a business, and single moms in general. 

Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Broker features marquee Korean stars Song Kang-ho (Parasite), K-pop idol IU (née Lee Ji-eun), and Bae Doona (Kingdom). The film delves into the black-market world of selling babies. Broker is told from the perspective of the birth mother So-young (Lee), as well as two male brokers Sang-hyeon (Song) and Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won) who, while affable, are still human traffickers selling infants to the highest domestic bidders.

While So-young is depicted as almost uncaring, especially in the early parts of the film, the brokers show tender paternal interest, gently cradling the baby as if he was theirs. But their ultimate goal is finding a “good” family for the child, based on no vetting other than who can pay the most — roughly $8,000 for a boy, $6,500 for a girl. The transactions are dehumanizing and gross.

Meanwhile, the film reflects South Korea’s ostracizing attitude toward unwed mothers and their children through a sneering police detective. While on a sting operation, Officer Soo-jin (Bae) witnesses So-young leaving her infant at the baby box. She shows little compassion for So-young, and judgmentally says to her colleague, “Don’t have a baby if you’re going to abandon it.” Well, that’s what the English subtitles say. But the Korean word she uses is harsher and literally translates to “throw away,” as if you’re tossing out the trash.

For some adoptees, Broker adds a dose of reality to the promoted narrative that adoption is a blessing for everyone involved. Kat Turner, who blogs about Korean culture from the perspective of a Korean adoptee, says that point could have been made stronger if the brokers hadn’t been depicted as such caring characters. She felt the film exploited viewers’ emotions by presenting the brokers — one of whom had grown up in an orphanage — as likable, fatherly figures.

“They were selling babies, but [Broker] had them behaving like nurturing fathers,” says Turner, who was adopted at the age of one to a family in Iowa. “Their characters should’ve been darker. Instead, we were manipulated into almost feeling sorry for them. It’s important for people to realize the darker side of adoption, which includes the black market — not to mention the role money plays overall in adoption, even when it’s legal. So-Young hadn’t considered selling [her baby] until the idea was presented to her [by the brokers]. Adoption is a business. Not only would she get money, which she clearly needed, but [they presented] this notion that her baby would be better off with someone else.”

Indeed, one of the oddities in the film’s marketing is the use of a line culled from Ben Rolph’s review for Awards Watch: “Broker is a tender story of chosen families.” While the young birth mother and brokers (as well as an orphaned boy) do form a kind of de facto family for each other, how they came to be is neither tender nor a valid choice. The protagonist is an indigent 16-year-old sex worker who was abused and impregnated by a man twice her age. She has no family or income and cannot make feasible choices to raise her son by herself.

“The attitude of the film business about sensitive human rights issues has changed and developed tremendously,” says Dr. Kyung-eun Lee, director of Human Rights Beyond Borders and the author of the book The Global ‘Orphan’ Adoption System: South Korea’s Impact on Its Origin and Development. “As far as I understand, such attitudes or standards do not extend to issues of adoption, because adoption is not considered as a human rights issue yet. If adoption and the people related to adoption are used to fulfill the needs of the film business [and] objectified, we cannot expect that the true perspectives [of adoptees] are represented.”

There is no documentation as to how many baby brokers have facilitated illegal adoptions within South Korea. But Karlstad University’s Hübinette says Broker conveys the pervasive South Korean sentiment of intercountry adoption as a negative.

“On several occasions, the protagonists explicitly address and comment on the country’s long history of overseas adoption to the West,” says Hübinette, who was adopted from South Korea to Sweden when he was seven months old. “In one scene, one of the main characters says that he does not want the baby to be adopted away to a Western country. In another scene, there is a short reference made to a veritable profit-making adoption industry.”

For some critics of Broker, it wasn’t just the ethical concerns of abandoning an infant in a baby box that was problematic, but the film’s reinforcement of the negative stereotypes of single mothers.

“Harvesting economic gains in exchange for a baby is not unheard of,” says Hosu Kim, author of Birth Mothers and Transnational Adoption Practice in South Korea. “While Broker metaphorically captures illegal activity, adoption has always been the uncomfortable market aspect of what is known as humanitarian adoption practice. Given the long history of cultural prejudice and stigma against single mothers, [Kore-eda’s depiction of her] as a runaway teen who came along into the adoption ring as a potential profiteer presents negative reinforcement of birth mothers. It [presents] a gross, popular imagery of birth mothers as sexually promiscuous. A majority of those who had to select adoption [did so] as a means of survival. They have experienced domestic violence, spousal neglect, economic devastation, and a lack of public support for single motherhood for almost 70 years.”

Narratives about adoption should tap adult adoptees for insight.

Return to Seoul is loosely based on a trip Chou took with a friend to her native South Korea, where she was able to find her birth family. And Kore-eda said in the press notes for Broker that he was inspired to write his script after talking to children who had once been left in baby boxes.

Both films hold artistic merit, with exquisite acting by leads who add tender nuance to the compelling narratives. In his review of Broker for RogerEbert.com, Brian Tallerico describes Lee Ji-eun’s teenage mother as “phenomenal,” and Amy Nicholson’s New York Times review praises Park Ji-Min’s acting debut in Return to Seoul as “a full-bodied performance.” Filmgoers are drawn in by the stories, which stress poverty and the promise of a better life as the primary reasons for putting children up for adoption. But the two films alone aren’t able to depict all the intricacies of Korean adoption, nor are they expected to. Adoptees and their birth mothers aren’t a monolith who share the same experience.

What both films do well is tell the stories of the birth mothers and adoptees, without centering the plot around the adoptive parents-as-saviors trope. (Sandra Bullock’s The Blind Side, for instance, focused more on the adoptive mother than the teenage child her family adopted.) Still, there is room for improvement by adding authenticity.

“What puts so much pressure on the [adoptee] narratives is that there are so few of them,” says The Sense of Wonder author Matthew Salesses, who is a Korean adoptee. “It’s so high stakes to represent everything so well. What we really need is more [films about adoptees] so that the stakes are lower and they can cover the breadth of different experiences and stories. I wish [adoption-related projects] had [adoptee] consultants to help them get things right.”

Broker is currently playing in movie theaters. 

Return to Seoul, which had a week-long run in December for awards season, opens in New York and Los Angeles on Feb. 17, followed by a national rollout.

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You may read more about Return to Seoul in my SALON analysis.

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