Kuo Downing-Reese (郭慧如), a US flight paramedic who might have been the victim of a Taiwanese child-trafficking ring in the early 1980s, on Thursday appealed for the public’s help in finding her birth parents.
Accompanied by her adoptive mother Mary Reese, Downing-Reese has returned to Taiwan in an attempt to locate her birth family.
Private firms that provide genetic testing to help locate relatives are not common in Taiwan, Downing-Reese said, adding that her search on Web sites such as Ancestry.com and 23&me had proven unfruitful, reducing her hopes of finding her parents.
Photo: Wu Po-hsuan, Taipei Times
However, after a number of adoptees reported success in reuniting with their families in Taiwan, she became hopeful and decided to embark on her own campaign, Downing-Reese said.
She told a news conference organized by the Child Welfare League Foundation on Thursday that she wants to find her biological family because she wants the opportunity to get to know them.
If she has to go home empty-handed, she would try to use the trip as an opportunity to get to know Taiwan and its people better, Downing-Reese said.
In a mini-documentary on YouTube made by Taiwan-born New York filmmaker Hsi Cheng, Downing-Reese said she believes she is one of the “Julie Chu Babies.”
Although she has given Taiwanese media her birth information, the details might prove unhelpful if she is a victim of Julie Chu.
Chu, more commonly known in Taiwan as Chu Li-ching (褚麗卿), was a law clerk who was arrested on suspicion of leading a child-trafficking ring that was exposed in 1982.
Chu was allegedly the middleperson who helped families in Western countries such as the US, Australia, Finland and Sweden adopt children from Taiwan.
The families were all made aware of the opportunity to adopt through a British lawyer based in Thailand. After the families arrived in Taiwan, Chu took the parents through the process of adoption.
However, not all of the Taiwanese parents who gave up their children were who they claimed to be. It was found that the children were either given up by their birth parents or abducted at an early age.
To legalize the status of those toddlers, Chu was suspected of having hired people to pose as birth parents, as well as medical professionals to forge birth certificates and fake the children’s names, even going so far as to sometimes pass some children off as twins.
As a result, it is unknown whether Downing-Reese was trafficked or legally put up for adoption.
Chu was convicted and served time for forgery. She maintains she was not involved in a ring and is innocent of kidnapping, saying she was only guilty of falsifying papers to help orphans live a better life.
The foundation presented the information of two other Taiwan-born women whose adoptions were mediated by Chu.
Both women, Sabina Soderlund-Myllyharju (范嫚倫) and Kimbra Smith (陳信惠), have unsuccessfully attempted to find their biological families in Taiwan.
China has reserved offshore airspace in the Yellow Sea and East China Sea from March 27 to May 6, issuing alerts usually used to warn of military exercises, although no such exercises have been announced, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported yesterday. Reserving such a large area for 40 days without explanation is an “unusual step,” as military exercises normally only last a few days, the paper said. These alerts, known as Notice to Air Missions (Notams), “are intended to inform pilots and aviation authorities of temporary airspace hazards or restrictions,” the article said. The airspace reserved in the alert is
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
A bipartisan group of US senators has introduced a bill to enhance cooperation with Taiwan on drone development and to reduce reliance on supply chains linked to China. The proposed Blue Skies for Taiwan Act of 2026 was introduced by Republican US senators Ted Cruz and John Curtis, and Democratic US senators Jeff Merkley and Andy Kim. The legislation seeks to ease constraints on Taiwan-US cooperation in uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), including dependence on China-sourced components, limited access to capital and regulatory barriers under US export controls, a news release issued by Cruz on Wednesday said. The bill would establish a "Blue UAS
More than 6,000 Taiwanese students have participated in exchange programs in China over the past two years, despite the Mainland Affairs Council’s (MAC) “orange light” travel advisory, government records showed. The MAC’s publicly available registry showed that Taiwanese college and university students who went on exchange programs across the Strait numbered 3,592 and 2,966 people respectively. The National Immigration Agency data revealed that 2,296 and 2,551 Chinese students visited Taiwan for study in the same two years. A review of the Web sites of publicly-run universities and colleges showed that Taiwanese higher education institutions continued to recruit students for Chinese educational programs without
RSS