Seoul (AFP)

Summer 1985 in Seoul. That day, a seven-year-old boy, sitting alone on a bench at a crowded bus station, was sobbing in the desperate wait for his mother.

Jo Youn-hwan was wearing a little suit in the colors of a baseball team that his mother had bought the day before, the only gift she had ever given him.

Before leaving the terminal, she had asked him to wait for him wisely. He obeyed. But his fear increased in intensity as dusk approached. "I'll be really good if she comes back," he kept promising.

He never saw it again.

Jo Youn-hwan was cared for by the South Korean orphanage system.

But although the country was the first "exporter" of children for decades, this child was already too old for potential parents to set their sights on him. He spent the rest of his childhood in a "strictly hierarchical and cruel institution" until he was 18 years old.

Children died of curable diseases and the older ones abused the youngest daily, he tells AFP.

"When a new child came in and cried because he was scared, the ritual was that he would be wrapped in a blanket and hit with a baseball bat until he stopped," recalls -he.

The locals, the clothes were disgusting, the food spoiled, inedible, he says again.

For a long time he wondered what would have happened to him if he had been adopted.

"My life would not have been so full of + han +," he says, using the Korean word that defines a feeling of infinite sadness and resentment at the injustices suffered.

- The recognition due -

The international adoption that developed in South Korea just after the Korean War (1950 -1953) made it possible to "rid" the ethnically homogeneous country of Métis born of links between Korean and US soldiers, considered undesirable.

The South Koreans are themselves reluctant to adopt, so some 180,000 orphans have over the years been welcomed abroad, mainly in the United States.

At the orphanage, the youngest, "the most beautiful and the healthiest" were selected abroad, explains to AFP Arissa Oh, researcher at Boston College in the United States, according to "a logic of 'rescue' remained deeply rooted in the minds of Americans and Koreans: wealthy Americans could offer a Korean child a better life than that of poor parents or a single mother. "

This story has often created a sense of alienation among the small adoptees from their new country and their host family.

"All my life, I have been told - adopters, colleagues, school - that I should be grateful, that if I had not been adopted I would have ended up on the street, prostitute," says AFP Hanna Johansson, a Korean adopted in Sweden.

- "It could have been me" -

Born in Seoul in 1960, Korean-American filmmaker Glenn Morey was abandoned baby and adopted at six months by a Scottish-American couple. In Denver, Colorado, where he grew up still being the only non-white at school, he struggled to integrate.

"Being Asian made me different, insulted, harassed and excluded," he says. "When growing up, we are confronted daily with problems, we wonder how things would have been in Korea, where we would have felt at least like the others."

His latest film "Side x Side" is a documentary attempt to answer this question by questioning twelve South Koreans who have been orphaned.

Two of them, suffering from handicaps, told him about their life in the street, without a stable job, the constant uncertainty of the next meal and the violence always around the corner.

"I just want a normal life," said one of them.

"Every time we shoot, it rips my heart," the director recalls, "it could have been me somehow, and their fights, mine."

- "Why did she lie?" -

Abandoned children are stigmatized all their lives in South Korea, seen as the result of a guilty relationship, often out of wedlock, and because they can not claim any family lineage. They experience discrimination in their job search and social relationships. To the point that some lie to hide their orphanage years to their spouse, in-laws, employers.

The case of Mr. Jo is, in his words, singular. He graduated and the director of his orphanage paid his scholarship for the university. He is now a taxi driver, married, father.

Last year he created the first group in South Korea to defend the rights of the "elders" of the orphanage. According to his data, 93% of these "old" have already been charged, homeless or have worked illegally. "It's our reality," he admits.

Last year, he managed to locate his mother but his discoveries have not appeased him. His father, an inveterate gambler, was abusing his mother who, in search of another man to marry, decided to rid herself of the child to hide her past. Before him, his older sister had the same fate.

"Why did not I at least live with my father or grandmother, why did she lie to my father and say I was dead?"

Mr. Jo does not explain it. "I'm still struggling to digest that, it's hard, very, very hard."

© 2019 AFP