Last year, South Korea took responsibility for enabling the ‘mass export’ of children for sale abroad. Now those uprooted are grappling with false promises of a better life

As international, transracial adoptees in their 30s in the US, Jacquelyn Wells and Lauren White-Gydas have things in common.

They were both born in South Korea to unwed mothers in the 1980s. Both were shipped to the US as newborns to join white families who eagerly welcomed adorable, new daughters. And neither knew many other Asians in the towns where they grew up – Wells in Westford, Massachusetts, and White-Gydas in Salem, Oregon.