Korean-American star AleXa is on a quest to find fame and family through K-pop

Korean-American K-pop star AleXa has wanted to be on stage since she was a kid, but her search for fame in South Korea was also fuelled by another reason — to help her mother find her birth family.

Adopted from South Korea by an American family, her mother knows little about her birth culture nor does she speak the language.

The blue-haired 25-year-old who recently won the American Song Contest — the US version of Eurovision — said that eating kimchi was one of her few cultural links to her Korean heritage growing up.

That is, until AleXa discovered K-pop in 2008.

“That kind of sparked my dream and my drive to become a K-pop artist,” said the Tulsa-born rising star, who has been dancing since she was two.

Growing up in Oklahoma, AleXa said seeing entertainers on-screen she could identify with as a Korean American showed her “an interesting path to follow”.

At university, she took home the top prize at a K-pop competition — a trip to South Korea to film a reality show where she met executives from her future company and entered the gruelling star-making training so many young hopefuls embark on.

She moved to Seoul in 2018 and — having never spoken it while growing up — studied Korean at an academy for a few months, continuing her lessons by watching movies and TV shows while undergoing intensive dance classes.

Search for mother

While AleXa has found success as a K-pop idol, her quest to find her mother’s family is proving to be a more arduous process, foiled by South Korea’s restrictive adoptive laws.

Born in Ilsan, northwest of Seoul, her mother was adopted when she was five.

Like many adoptees, she would like to trace her birth family, but “the laws here in Korea are a little strict regarding if the child can find their birth parents and vice versa,” AleXa said.

South Korea places the right to privacy of the birth parent above the rights of the adoptee.

The country has long been a major exporter of overseas adoptees, with hundreds of thousands sent away since the 1950s.

After the Korean War, it was a way to remove children — especially those born to local mothers and American GI fathers — from a country that emphasises ethnic homogeneity.

Even today, unmarried pregnant women still face stigma in a patriarchal society and are often forced to give up their babies.

“The opposite party must be in search of the other in order for the first party to gain information,” the singing star said.

That has not happened in their case, so her mother is still unable to find AleXa’s grandma.

However, she has had some success through the internet and DNA testing, and found some cousins in other countries.

AleXa said they haven’t given up hope.

“Hopefully in the future, we can find some of my Korean family here. It would be nice,” she said, adding that she now considers Seoul her “second home”.

“Korea is a rather homogenous country. So having all of these foreign idols, I think it’s a really cool eye-opening opportunity for Korea as well,” she said. AFP