Sisters apart for 25 years are reunited
Published: September 16, 2003
By the time toddler Jung Sook Paik was sent to an orphanage in South Korea, her paperwork did not indicate that she had a little sister.
The younger girl had gone to a foster home a year earlier, effectively removing any trace of her from Jung Sook’s life.
So it was not until last summer - 24 years after their separation-that Jung Sook learned about her sister during a trip to Seoul to find her Korean family.
And it was not until Friday that the sisters were reunited in Cleveland, far from where their lives began as the daughters of a sailor and a woman they still know little about.
The sisters spent the weekend together, laughing as they flipped through photo albums, told stories and teased each other about how they looked as children.
“The feeling is just awe,” said Sarah Andrew, the little sister whose name was Eun Sook Paik before she was adopted by a Cleveland couple when she was about 2 years old. “It doesn’t feel like we’ve been apart for 25 years. We’re just family.”
Andrew, 27, had always known she had an older sister. Her adoptive parents, the Rev. Robert Andrew, an Episcopal priest, and his wife, Eleanor, had told her early on and she included her sister and mother in her bedtime prayers.
The Andrews adopted Sarah after getting involved with Concern for Children, a Cleveland international adoption group that met at St. Philip the Apostle Episcopal Church on Denison Avenue when Andrew was the rector there.
Andrew now has two young children of her own and because of that had been thinking about searching out her Korean sister and mother. But before she got started, a letter arrived this spring from Jung Sook, who had been adopted by a Dutch couple and whose last name is now Calje.
The letter arrived just as Robert and Eleanor Andrew were preparing for a trip to Amsterdam. When they found out Sarah’s sister lived there, they arranged to meet Jung Sook and her adopted parents.
In Amsterdam, hugs and pictures were exchanged and the adoptive parents joyfully talked about the sisters they had raised on different continents. The sisters later began talking on the telephone and corresponding through e-mails.
“Even on the telephone, it didn’t seem like we were strangers,” Sarah Andrew said. “It just came naturally.”
Growing up in Cleveland and Amsterdam, the girls had taken little interest in their Korean heritage. But Jung Sook’s adoptive mother encouraged her to discover those roots. She quickly found her father’s family and an older half-sister, Mi Sook.
“It was very emotional for her,” Jung Sook said of her half-sister. “She could still remember when we were little and what it was like to lose us.”
Since then, Jung Sook has slowly been piecing together the history.
Relatives in Korea told her that their father was lost at sea in 1977. Their mother later abandoned them, taking a son from a previous marriage with her when she fled in the middle of the night with a man on a motorcycle.
The girls went to live with their father’s brother. But he had two children of his own and could not support the three girls as well.
Jung Sook will spend two weeks in Cleveland and Andrew plans to visit her next year in Amsterdam. The following year, they hope to travel together to Korea.
“This is just our beginning,” Andrew said.
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