Bowers, whose Korean name is Jung Nayoung, describes herself as a “messy eater” since childhood with an insatiable appetite – one that has led her to pursue a career as a competitive eater over the past decade.
Her impressive feats include eating 80 chicken wings in 10 minutes, 65 gyoza dumplings in 10 minutes, and 14 doughnuts in eight minutes.
She placed in the top 10 in the latest women’s hot dog eating competition by consuming seven and a quarter hot dogs in 10 minutes.
I thought I was an orphan up until about four years ago
“I wish that I had performed better, although obviously I had other priorities happening in my life, so I know that I was definitely not at peak performance,” Bowers says, noting that her record is 12 and a half hot dogs in 10 minutes.
Bowers, who was adopted by an American family in 1982 and raised in Colorado, has had a lot on her plate recently.
In 2020, she embarked on a journey to find her biological family, which prompted her to move to Seoul that year.
Bowers’ quest to find answers has been riddled with misinformation and allegedly fabricated adoption documents.
We’re seeing similar patterns of [ …] adoptees being sent [abroad] under false identities
Her adoption, arranged through the Seoul-based Eastern Welfare Society, probably took place when she was one or two years old. In the adoption papers she was listed under three different Korean surnames – Jung, Chung and Baik.
In November 2019, Bowers came across an article revealing the alleged role played by another institution, Brothers Home, in Korea’s international adoption of children.
Brothers Home, a now-closed state-run welfare facility in Busan, was accused of kidnapping and mistreating hundreds of children and disabled individuals from the 1960s to the 1980s.
The report alleged the facility played a significant role in adoption procedures, acting as a “supply chain” for private adoption agencies in the process of sending babies abroad.
“It just happened to be towards the end of the article [that] I recognised familiar names who signed off my adoption documents. Initially, I thought I was imagining things, so I had to go back and check my documents,” Bowers says.
“But unfortunately, I was not.”
She then looked further into the history of Korea’s military dictatorships in the 1960s and 1980s, during which there were surges in international adoptions.
In December 2022, Bowers filed her case with Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission – which investigates historical incidents relating to human rights abuses – joining nearly 400 other Korean adoptees from 11 countries including Denmark, Norway, the US and Australia.
I’ve received so much help and support from Koreans, even strangers
These adoptees claim their adoptions were marred by falsified documents that obscured the status of children through local adoption agencies. They also speculate the Korean government was involved in the malpractice.
The commission plans to release preliminary results for the initial 100 cases filed by the end of this year, with the remainder expected in May 2025.
“We’re seeing similar patterns of children being declared as orphans when they still had living parents, and adoptees being sent [abroad] under false identities,” Bowers says. “Some of them are old enough to remember all this.
“You see these very similar patterns, which is why we submitted these claims together,” she adds.
In the summer of 2023, Bowers underwent seven DNA tests across both national and commercial databases in hopes of finding her biological family.
About a year later, those DNA samples led to her finding her younger brother, Chase Malmgren, who she had never known.
The 19-year-old, whose Korean name is Baik In-soo but was listed as In-ho on some documents, was also adopted by an American family at a young age.
Malmgren had also been desperately looking for his biological family, Bowers says. He submitted his DNA samples to Korean agencies in 2018.
The DNA tests showed a 100 per cent match, confirming Bowers and Malmgren were biological siblings.
The joy of finding each other was tainted, however, by speculation that their adoption documents had been forged.
Eastern Welfare Society confirmed that Bowers’ parents were a married couple, while Holt International, which arranged Malmgren’s adoption, claimed that his mother did not even know who his father was.
“But Chase and I have a 100 per cent DNA match, which means we have the same mother and same father. Now we know by our existence that those things are false. Then the question becomes, what else did the agency lie to us about?” Bowers says.
Now, together with her brother, Bowers will continue to search for their birth parents and strive to uncover the truth behind the murky adoption process they experienced.
“Every country has its good and bad aspects. Even after all of this, I believe that the majority of Korean people are good.
“I’ve received so much help and support from Koreans, even strangers. So I think that a few bad people or difficult truths don’t outweigh all of the good things that I have here,” Bowers says.