Mary Bowers, a Korean adoptee to the United States, recently competed in the Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest in New York, representing Korea.
This was her ninth participation in the July 4 annual competition and the second time representing her native country, following the restoration of her Korean citizenship last year.
Bowers, whose Korean name is Jung Nayoung, describes herself as a “messy eater” since childhood, with a non-stop appetite that led her to pursue a career as a competitive eater over the past decade. Her impressive feats include eating up to 80 chicken wings in 10 minutes, 65 gyoza dumplings in the same timeframe, and 14 donuts in just eight minutes.
In the latest hot dog eating contest, she ranked in the top 10 in the women’s competition by finishing seven and a quarter hot dogs in 10 minutes.
“I do 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 said in a recent interview with The Korea Times, noting that her best record is 12 and a half hot dogs.
The Korean-born adoptee, who was raised in Colorado since she was adopted by an American family in 1982, 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.
When asked what led her to pursue efforts to find her biological roots, Bowers replied, “I thought I was an orphan up until about four years 토토 ago. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I had extra time on my hands due to social distancing regulations, so I started looking into some old records and started finding some interesting conflicts.”
However, her quest to find answers has been riddled with misinformation and alleged fabrication of adoption documents.
Her adoption, arranged through the Seoul-based Eastern Welfare Society, took place when she was probably 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 a media report revealing the alleged role of Brothers Home in Korea’s intercountry adoption of children from the 1960s to the 1980s. Brothers Home, which is now shut down, was a notorious state-run welfare facility in Busan accused of kidnapping and mistreating hundreds of children and disabled individuals during that time.
The report alleged that the facility played a significant role in the adoption procedures, acting as a “supply chain” for private adoption agencies in the process of sending babies abroad.
“It just happened to be toward the end of the article (on Brothers Home), I recognized 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 said.