A 70-year-old South Korean woman sued her government, an adoption agency, and an orphanage Monday over the adoption of her daughter, who was sent to the United States in 1976, months after she was kidnapped at age 4. The damage suit filed by Han Tae-soon, whose story was part of an Associated Press investigation published last month, could ignite further debate on the dubious child-gathering practices and widespread falsification of paperwork that tarnished South Korea’s adoption program, which annually sent thousands of kids to the West during the 1970-80s. It was the first known case of a Korean birth parent suing for damages against the government and an adoption agency over the wrongful adoption of their child, said Kim Soo-jung, one of the lawyers representing Han.

“As a child, I assumed my Koreanness just fell away like a snake shedding its skin. I thought, 'That must be what happens when you’re adopted.'”

BUSAN, South Korea (AP) — A notorious South Korean facility that kidnapped, abused and enslaved children and the disabled for a generation was also shipping children overseas for adoption, part of a massive profit-seeking enterprise that thrived by exploiting those trapped within its walls, The Asso

Agnès Dherbeys returns to South Korea, from where she and many others were adopted, to meet some of those who were impelled to abandon their children.

Filmmaker Sun Hee Engelstoft is one of about 200,000 South Koreans to have been adopted overseas during the past six decades, mainly to white parents in America and Europe.

Adopted at seven months old, I grew up burying my Korean identity and presenting myself as culturally white. And then, I learned to cook.