REUNITED AND IT FEELS SO GOOD - Denise McCarty

 REUNITED AND IT FEELS SO GOOD

Forty-four years is an awfully long time. Denise McCarty knows that. She lives in Vermont, USA, but many years ago she was adopted from South Korea by a family in the United States.

For years she wondered how and why it happened. She was told that she was abandoned. Why? she asked herself. Now, after so many years, she has been (virtually) reunited with the family she did not know. 

Denise’s birth name is Sang-Ae. Her twin sister’s name is Sang-Hee. When they were just three years old they went with their grandmother to a market in Seoul. But in the overcrowded place the little children were separated from their grandmother and lost.

Three days later Sang-Hee was found. But there was no sign of Sang-Ae.  Someone had found the little child and taken her to an orphanage in Seoul. Soon after that she was adopted by Americans who became her parents.

As she grew up in the United States Sang-Ae was told that she was abandoned.  She wondered why. In fact, her family in Korea never stopped searching for her. They even started a business in the market where she disappeared with the hope that one day she would come there. The years passed. There was no sign of Sang-Ae.

In 2016, however, Sang-Ae went with her adopted parents on a visit to South Korea. There she signed up for a program that matches US adoptees with their families according to Korea Now.

Unknown to Sang-Ae, the following year her mother signed up for the program.

Then it happened! The results came and “earlier this month their DNA was finally matched,” Ashley Boucher writes in MSN News. Sang-Ae was able to reconnect with her Korean family. Her father and grandmother have passed on.

In an emotional virtual reunion on October 14, 2020 her twin sister told her “We never abandoned you, Sang-Ae. We were looking for you every day.” 

“To know that I have a twin sister that looks just like me,” Denise told WCAX. “To have that missing piece of what happened to me…….it makes me feel whole.” 

The family is “reunited, and it feels so good,” as Peaches and Herb sang in 1979.

The best is yet to come. Once international travel resumes Denise aka Sang-Ae will have the joy of meeting her mother, her twin sister and older brother - her family in Korea, in person.