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Name	Adoptee Solidarity Korea

Subject	With faith, an American adoptee's search for his father ends on death row 2007.9.17

International Herald Tribune
Published: September 17, 2007

With faith, an American adoptee's search for his father ends on death row

By Choe Sang-Hun

SEOUL: Aaron Bates, growing up a happy child in the American family that adopted him when he was 5, always wondered who his biological parents were and whether they were alive. After two decades, his search has led him to a prisoner on death row in South Korea.

Sung Nak Joo, 58, who says he is Bates's birth father (and is accepted as such by Bates despite genetic data suggesting otherwise) is one of the longest-serving death row inmates in South Korea. If the country resumes hanging condemned prisoners - the last executions took place in 1997 - he probably will be among the first to be executed.

"You hear a song and you know the name of the band, but can't remember it. It was one of those kinds of yearnings," said Bates, a 34-year-old insurance agent in Arizona. "Oh man, I got to find out who that band was. Man, I know I have parents, but who are they?"

Bates's quest to find his birth parents and to build a father-son bond with a death row inmate is the basis of "My Father," a feature film released here this month. In the first week, it attracted 450,000 viewers - high for South Korea - to its exploration of human failings and redemption, and the meaning of family.

South Koreans, with their emphasis on safeguarding bloodlines, are reluctant to adopt other people's children. This has been one of the factors in South Korea's becoming one of the world's leading "baby exporters." Each year, 2,000 children leave Korea for overseas adoption, more than half of them to American families. A similar number of Korean-born adoptees visit each year to discover their roots.

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When 5-year-old Do Jin Chul arrived in Colorado on a snowy March day in 1979, to be adopted into the family of Graham and Rebecca Bates, he had no memory of his Korean parents.

It took years for the boy, now known as Aaron Bates, to put together his life's puzzle. But not all pieces fit and some are still missing. Bates appears willing to compensate with hope and faith.

"I was one of those cases where someone placed a baby at the front gate of an orphanage, knocked on the door, and left," said Bates, in an interview here.

According to the information Bates has collected, Sung, the death row inmate, was himself an orphan raised by a Buddhist monk. He met Bates's mother, a dressmaker named Do Jin Sook, also an orphan, when she found him on a Seoul street after he had been beaten and took care of him.

Bates's mother died a few months after giving birth to him in 1973, while Sung was in the military. When Sung learned that Do had died, he attempted to escape from the military and was court-martialed.

Little more is known about Sung's life until he made headlines in 1994. He killed his girlfriend's 14-year-old daughter, and a week later, killed his girlfriend. The police quoted Sung as saying that he lost his temper when the woman asked him to leave because he was "penniless and could not function as a man."

Meanwhile, in the United States, Bates was growing up in a well-to-do and devoutly Christian family, who had their own daughter and two other adopted children from Korea. Occasionally he had flashbacks to Korea: rolling down a hill behind an orphanage, gazing into a well with fish swimming in it. They were disjointed images from a long-lost world and made little sense.

"I never dwelled on it," he said. "I was happy and had everything I wanted."

But the yearning was there, he said, when people asked why he looked different and when he wondered what his birth parents looked like. In 1996 he quit college and joined the army, requesting an assignment in Korea.

"I thought, why not take this golden opportunity to search?" he said.

Bates was able to find his old orphanage in Gwangju in the southern part of the country. He appeared on a TV program for Korean adoptees looking for their parents, and was featured in a story in a Gwangju newspaper.

Sung, who had recently been transferred to a Gwangju prison, saw Bates's baby picture in the newspaper. It was the same photograph he had. But he didn't contact Bates, because, as Bates said, "he was ashamed." When Bates returned to the United States in 1997 to undergo Special Forces training, he still had no information about his Korean parents.

Then, in January 2000, a Korean doctor in Chicago called Bates's American parents on behalf of a doctor who had treated Sung in prison. Sung had asked the doctor to help find his son. Sung's first letter reached Bates a month later.

When Bates flew to South Korea in July 2000, he knew Sung was imprisoned for murder but didn't realize he was on death row. It was on a train to Gwangju that a Korean soldier friend read newspaper reports about Bates's arrival and filled him in.

"It was a 10-second 'wow,' " Bates said. "It didn't really faze me. I wanted to see my dad."

Bates's arrival created a sensation. The media uproar compelled prison authorities to break with precedent and allow the gaunt death-row inmate into a reception room to meet the young man from America. TV crews instructed Bates to make a traditional Korean bow on the floor before Sung and to say in Korean, "Father, I love you."

"It made me uncomfortable," Bates said. "But I thank the media. If they weren't there, I would have seen my father behind bars for the first time."

After persuading the U.S. military to reassign him to South Korea, he visited his father almost every month.

"I asked a lot of questions about mom," Bates said. "I remember telling him how much I love him, telling him not to worry about death, telling him that he is my father."

In 2001, Bates, seeking absolute proof that Sung was his biological father, collected hairs from him during a visit and ran a DNA test, without telling Sung what he was doing. The result shook what he had built for the past year: the two were not genetically related.

"He is very tough, self-confident and cheerful, even during prison visits," Jung Hyun Mo, a producer at KBS-TV, said of Bates. "But I had never seen him so baffled as he was when the DNA test result came out."

After a month or so, Bates began visiting Sung again. He decided to take another DNA test, this time with a sample of Sung's saliva, but then changed his mind. Bates said the fact that Sung had pictures of him and his mother was proof enough for him.

"By faith in God, the real hard facts and evidence prior to the DNA testing, and by unconditional love, I made my decision - he is my father," Bates said. He never told Sung of the DNA result because "my relationship with my father is building and most of all, I'm not about to ruin what I've been searching for."

Bates sent letters to the South Korean government, human rights groups and lawmakers in Seoul and Washington, appealing to them to help spare Sung's life. He tried in vain to find the victims' family to apologize on Sung's behalf. Before returning to the United States in 2002, he formally registered as Sung's son, so that he can collect his ashes should he be executed.

Since then, Bates has visited Sung roughly once a year. This month, Bates and his American parents attended the movie's premiere and visited Sung.

Some bloggers have criticized the film as "beautifying" the life of a murderer. But Bates said he hoped viewers would see positive elements in the story.

"Love conquers all," he said. "Let's learn to forgive and forget. All parents out there, enjoy your children. All children out there, enjoy your parents. Life is too short."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/18/asia/adopt-web.php?page=1

Photo:
Sung Nak Joo, at left, was on death row in a Korean prison for murder. In 2000, he was put in contact with Bates via his doctor. Sung said that he was Bates's father, and Bates flew back to Korea to be reunited with him. (Courtesy of Aaron Bates)

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