Tracy O’Neill was adopted from South Korea in the 1980s and never thought to search for her birth mother until 2020 when the world seemed to stop. She had just landed a tenure-track position at Vassar and had broken up with a long-term boyfriend. With more time on her hands—teaching online and not leaving her new apartment much—she had the desire to find her birth mother in Korea. The story of her search, discovery and meeting her mother is the subject of her third book, Woman of Interest. This is hardly the first adoption memoir, but O’Neill is a writer of some pedigree with a couple of novels under her belt, which perhaps explains why her memoir at times reads like a thriller and does so right at the beginning.
When she started looking into ways to find birth mother—a woman she only knew of as Cho Kee Yeon, thanks to a her Immigration and Naturalization papers—agency and government offices were closed because of the pandemic, so she decided to hire a private investigator named Joe Adams, an eccentric who claimed he bought a Corvette with money he had made training Contras.
That Corvette money had been funneled through the maneuvers of Oliver North. The CIA sent Joe Adams to Honduras and to Nicaragua, and because when Joe Adams shot, the bullet hit its aim, the rebel paramilitary Adolfo Calero had called Joe “Tirador,” his marksman. This PI was a good shot. Maybe my best.
Adams doesn’t end up as a central character in O’Neill’s story; he disappears for weeks on end and without any explanation, but his simple advice ultimately leads her to find Cho Kee Yeon: O’Neill is to do as much investigative work on her own.
Although she locates staff that worked at the agency that facilitated her adoption, that doesn’t lead to new information. It’s through submitting saliva samples to a number of DNA companies that O’Neill eventually finds a distant cousin of her mother’s, one who has a relative named Phillip in Washington State. Phillip becomes the conduit to O’Neill’s birth family in Korea.

The first half of the book documents O’Neill’s search for Cho Kee Yeon and while she extends this search far and wide, she also uses these chapters to reflect on why she wants to find her birth mother.
To see her could be to encounter my future. To see her could be to find that cradle-to-grave offered rewards outside those of the nuclear family or that the clincher was that love came back around. It could be to witness every day in the good life was amateur night, and though time passed through screwups, it still meant something. It could have something to do with controlling destiny, controlling story, dulling down my own historical sense of life’s arbitrariness and contradictions of character.
At this point, the parents who raised her and her adopted Korean brother in a comfortable Irish Catholic household in New England know nothing about O’Neill’s search. She needs to find Cho Kee Yeon first, she reasons, before telling her parents. Through Phillip, O’Neill connects with the family of Cho Kee Yeon who live in Korea. Suddenly, O’Neill is on her way to Seoul and what she finds is a story filled with lies, deceptions, and omissions.
O’Neill arrives around the time the omicron variant is on the rise, yet she’s allowed to quarantine in the home of a relative, not in a hotel. She’s able to meet aunts, cousins, and even a half-sister. As she learns, her mother had three other children she did not give up for adoption. O’Neill’s case was different. Cho Kee Yeon, whose name was in fact Cho Kyu Yeon—nothing is as it first appears in O’Neill’s birth family—was married with two children and left her husband for another man. This married man became O’Neill’s birth father, but the relationship between her birth parents did not last. Cho Kyu Yeon married again and had another child with that husband. The family tree is complicated and O’Neill tries to find compassion for Cho Kyu Yeon. Once her quarantine is over, she stays with her birth mother and Phillip interprets over Zoom. It is not easy.
O’Neill captures in her writing the complexities of family and the pain caused by separation and by keeping secrets. By the end of her book, O’Neill is back in the US, back among her friends, and back in the same time zone as her parents. And she knows that the rest of her story has yet to be written.
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