Lia Kim Bullock, 36, first met her Alameda mother and father when she was 14 months old, leaving life as a Korean orphan and becoming a daughter and sister in an American family.
Her parents, Susan and Richard Bullock Sr., began the adoption process in the early 1970s before Lia was born. The couple had three sons and wanted a daughter. Susan Bullock laughed as she explained why she chose to adopt a daughter.
“I knew if we had our own, we’d have a boy, and four boys is more than I could contemplate,” she said. They chose to adopt from Korea because it was a desperate time for families there (and still is, she added). They contacted Dillon International Inc., an Oklahoma-based nonprofit child placement agency specializing in international adoption, including many homeless Korean orphans. Korea, like several Asian countries, does not adopt children from its own country, Bullock said.
The agency sent the couple a photograph of Lia when she was 9 months old. Five months later, a Dillon representative brought their new daughter to the U.S. and she took her place in the Bullock family.
The years flew past, with the usual busy days of family life, school, sports, homework and play. Life was good, Lia Bullock, now 36, said. Occasionally, she would wonder about her birth mother and the situation that led to making her an orphan and about the country she left as a baby, but never to the point that she wasn’t happy to be at home with her family in Alameda.
“I remember as young as second and third grade having a lot of questions,” she said. “I was curious about going to Korea, high school, thinking about it more.
Now 36, she is a registered nurse in the intensive-care ward of Eden Medical Center in Castro Valley and she has a 9-year-old daughter, Tiana.
In June, Susan, Lia and Tiana Bullock took their first trip to Korea, specifically to Seoul, to go on one of Dillon’s birth land tours.
“It was more than I expected,” Lia Bullock said. “I went into Seoul naive; I didn’t realize how huge it is. The tour was to learn about the culture, to see temples and other sites, and there was also a chance to review files to see if there was any information about my biological family. I had already seen all the adoption papers, and there wasn’t anything in them about my biological parents, but on the trip I came across some information that even though my mother abandoned me, it brought me comfort to know that for a very short time I was cared for by my family.”
Her daughter was delighted with the time she spent holding babies in foster homes. And Susan was struck by the beauty of the city and the caring people in the city and from Dillon.
Lia and Tiana Bullock will return to Korea in November on a “mission” trip, when they will go to foster homes to help with baby care and other places, such as places where women learn skills for trades, or an orphanage for disabled children.
“When we returned from the first trip I had a yearning to go back,” she said. “And my daughter wants to go back so she can hold more babies.”
For details about Dillon International go to www.dillonadopt.com/Korea-A.htm.