Woman Of Interest by Tracy O'Neill

The pandemic was like a flood--disasterous for everyone but not an equal opportunity disaster. Those of us in healthcare were run ragged and many of us saw severe suffering. Others were given a lot of time to think, and that is what happened with this author. She was born in South Korea in 1986 and adopted as an infant by an Irish-American couple. Raised in New England, she was not surprisingly taught to love the one you are with, that family is who you choose and not where you came from. Until she was thirty-three, she hadn’t given much thought to learning more about the woman her adoption papers named as Cho Kee Yeon. But during the lockdowns of spring 2020, O’Neill — gripped by the thought that her birth mother might be dying alone in Korea. This is another great story about the power of DNA. For centuries people could lie about it--mostly men who wanted to avoid admitting to infidelity or accepting responsibility for paternity. Now that is simply not possible, and the author uses her DNA to find her relatives and tries to connect with her birth mother.