The people we miss
by Cynthia J. Drake, MA ’08
One student’s journey across the world and on national television to find his mother
Patrick Bonczyk just wanted to find his mother.
After 20 years of living in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, he found himself in Seoul, South Korea, where 23 million people weave through the city’s clogged streets and subway system every day on their way to work, school and home.
It was May 2007, and the CMU sophomore traveled to the city on a study abroad experience. Patrick and his younger brother had both been adopted from South Korea and raised near Escanaba. Until arriving in Seoul, he had never known any native Koreans.
But he had one Korean in mind that he most wanted to know.
Soft-spoken and intellectually charged, Patrick loves stationery and “old things” and is keenly focused on his future in music, majoring in vocal music at CMU. After playing the violin most of his life, he started singing in high school choir and has developed an appreciation for an 18th century vocal style called “countertenor,” which he will continue to study in a music history graduate program.
The physical description “short Korean guy” usually suffices when he’s in Michigan. He’s grown up ambiguous about his identity, living in a place where no one looks like him, including his family.
In 1991 when he was 4 years old, he was listening to his mom’s favorite country station and proclaimed, after hearing the strains of a fiddle, that he “wanted whatever made that sound.”
In Korea that same year, a woman was buying a violin for her son. She didn’t know when she would give it to him, since she hadn’t seen him since she gave birth. Perhaps the act of buying it was a fervent act of hope and faith that one day they would be reunited.
It’s not easy to find someone in the world’s fifth largest city.
Patrick had already contacted his adoption agency, whose employees plowed through his paperwork and came up empty-handed. He waited a year and tried again. The agency only had a few breadcrumbs of information to share this time. They told Patrick that his mother was a piano teacher and had met his father while singing in a church choir.
This piqued his curiosity.
Next, Patrick sought assistance through GOAL, Global Overseas Adoption Link, a group that was founded by Korean adoptees who returned to Korea to find their birth families.
GOAL has the process of finding mothers down to a science. They posted notices with national media and created a “commercial” for Patrick – a 20-second plea to television audiences to let them know of his search. It’s standard operating procedure in a country where nearly 100,000 children have been adopted by American families since 1953.
One of the stations that received Patrick’s commercial was intrigued by his story and invited him on a program dedicated to reuniting families, called “The People We Miss,” a veritable “Oprah Winfrey Show” of Korean television.
“Suddenly I was on national live television,” says Patrick. “I had written a letter to my mother. They had a famous soap opera actress reading it, and the whole audience was just bawling.”
In fact, across Korea, families were tuning in and tearing up. He received phone calls from friends who had been watching and sending their best wishes. Strangers stopped him on the street. But still no word from his mother.
The same week he went on television, Patrick turned 20. He continued going to school and spent time with his girlfriend. At the end of the week, he received a phone call from GOAL. They asked him to come to their office.
“They said, ‘Are you ready for this? We found your mother. She’s living a half-hour away from you on the same subway line,’” he says. “The police had found her within a day.”
The producers of “The People We Miss” asked if Patrick would appear on the program again for a live reunion. He reluctantly agreed, his brain reeling from the impossibility of the situation.
He brought 20 roses for her, one for each year they had been apart.
They kept her behind an ornate stage door while Patrick nervously tried to participate in another interview, her silhouette outlined behind him.
Patrick was determined to speak Korean, rehearsing his lines before the show. Still, for a split second he doubted the truth behind the spectacle. It seemed so surreal. “This is a joke,” he thought.
The host of the show announced, “Call your mother and she’ll come through the door.” Patrick did.
When he saw her, he immediately knew she was his mother. She had a radiant smile and soft, wavy hair. She was shorter than Patrick. And in her arms, she carried 20 roses.
Patrick’s voice is strong and sweet, projecting sound throughout the walls of the practice room in CMU’s Music Building.
“When I’m singing, I’m using my mind in a different way. It’s a whole different lexicon,” he says. “I could tell you what a piece means in plain English, but it wouldn’t be the same experience.”
Patrick says studying abroad helped him focus academically. “I saw how music majors at another university differed from CMU music majors, and I saw how music, on the large scale, is important and affects society,” he says. “I was able to gain a better knowledge of how I fit in the world, academically and personally.”
Throughout his life, Patrick has been exposed to many different languages, but the one he gravitates toward naturally is music.
Patrick developed his Korean language while spending time with his mother after their reunion. “She wanted me over all the time,” he says. Toward the end of his time abroad, he spent two and a half months with her. His adoptive family also traveled to South Korea to meet his Korean family.
He met aunts, uncles and cousins. They gave him letters, prepared him special meals, celebrated lost birthdays. He discovered more similarities he shared with his mother, like certain gestures and favorite foods. One relative told him he resembled his grandfather.
“It was like I had always been an integral part of the family – they had just not seen me for 20 years,” he says.
When his birth mother discovered that he played violin, she hosted an impromptu concert at her house. The dining room, brightly lit with an old chandelier, was crowded with relatives while Patrick expertly maneuvered the bow of his instrument.
Eating, drinking, laughing and listening to Patrick’s music – that was how they welcomed an old family member back home. •
Cynthia Drake is a writer living in Mount Pleasant.
cynthia@cynthiadrake.com
