Abstract
Ji Sun Sjögren was born in Korea and brought up in Belgium, where she was adopted by her Swiss mother and Swedish father at the age of two. The following account, inspired by the experience of visiting her native Korea for the first time, aged 26, is a moving testimony of what it can feel like to be caught between two worlds, despite a loving and largely happy upbringing. Above all she speaks up for the right of every child to know her or his origin and to be the rightful owner of a birth certificate.
Ji Sun's account was written with the help of her adoptive father, Eric Sjögren, who is a journalist living in Brussels. Twenty years earlier, he himself had written a ‘misty-eyed, infatuated’ account of the first few years of living with his adopted daughter. It is partly in the light of the huge sympathetic response to that article that he encouraged Ji Sun to tell her own story.
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