A survivor of a brutal South Korean facility where thousands were enslaved and viciously abused in the 1980s, Joo-Rei Mathieson is now on a mission to discover her biological roots decades after she was adopted to Canadian parents.
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, chillingly for a government-sponsored vagrants’ facility that survivors have told The Associated Press often worked children to death, that she’s “capable of labor.”
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, however, is now willing to speak publicly for the first time to improve her chances of finding her Korean relatives, including a possible sibling named Lee Chang-keun. The finding also raised disturbing questions about the circumstances of her adoption and that of her newfound kin, who didn’t respond to AP’s requests for comment.
Mathieson says she’s filled with questions: Did her parents leave her with a relative in Busan while scrambling to search for their missing sons? Was she kidnapped by police, like many other inmates at Brothers?
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