RITUAL

Abstract

In 1956 Harry Holt was in Korea tenaciously working to save the lives of Korean children. Children who were abandoned. Orphans. Many of them were of mixed race. One day an orphanage director from In Chon called Mr. Holt. "I have more babies than I have beds. Can you help me?" Mr. Holt replied, "I can take five." He drove to In Chon to bring the five children back with him to Seoul. One of the children Mr. Holt took back with him to his orphanage was a little girl about four years old. That little girl was Hong Soon Keum, she became Susan Gourley, and today I am Susan Cox. When I first arrived at the orphanage I would wake up in the night from bad dreams. It was Mr. Holt who personally came in and comforted me. He rocked me, sang songs to me, and when I wasn't frightened anymore, he took me into the kitchen and made us jelly sandwiches. He was my "grandfather," even before I had a mother and father of my own. I left Korea for my new life on October 9, 1956. I remember little about that trip. I do remember looking out a small round window, sitting next to a woman I could not understand, and feeling very, very scared. I was the 167th child to be adopted from Korea. More than 60,000 Korean children in the last forty years have made the same journey. That trip across the ocean is much more than a journey of several thousand miles. For those of us who have been adopted, it is the birth into our family.