but, in fact, there's somebody in the audience

who's never heard this story -- in front of an audience -- before,

so I'm a little more nervous than I normally am telling this story.

I used to be a photographer for many years.

In 1978, I was working for Time magazine,

and I was given a three-day assignment

to photograph Amerasian children,

children who had been fathered by American GIs

all over Southeast Asia, and then abandoned --

40,000 children all over Asia.

I had never heard the word Amerasian before.

I spent a few days photographing children in different countries,

and like a lot of photographers and a lot of journalists,

I always hope that when my pictures were published,

they might actually have an effect on a situation,

instead of just documenting it.

So, I was so disturbed by what I saw,

and I was so unhappy with the article that ran afterwards,

that I decided I would take six months off.

I was 28 years old.

I decided I would find six children in different countries,

and actually go spend some time with the kids,

and try to tell their story a little bit better

than I thought I had done for Time magazine.

In the course of doing the story,

I was looking for children who hadn't been photographed before,

and the Pearl Buck Foundation told me

that they worked with a lot of Americans who were

donating money to help some of these kids.

And a man told me, who ran the Pearl Buck Foundation in Korea,

that there was a young girl, who was 11 years old, being raised by her grandmother.

And the grandmother had never let any Westerners ever see her.

Every time any Westerners came to the village, she hid the girl.

And of course, I was immediately intrigued.

I saw photographs of her, and I thought I wanted to go.

And the guy just told me, "There's no way. This grandmother won't even -- you know,

there's no way she's ever going to let you meet this girl that's she's raising."

I took a translator with me, and went to this village,

found the grandmother, sat down with her.

And to my astonishment, she agreed to let me

photograph her granddaughter.

And I was paying for this myself, so I asked the translator

if it would be OK if I stayed for the week.

I had a sleeping bag.

The family had a small shed on the side of the house,

so I said, "Could I sleep in my sleeping bag in the evenings?"

And I just told the little girl, whose name was Hyun-Sook Lee,

that if I ever did anything to embarrass her --

she didn't speak a word of English, although she looked very American --

she could just put up her hand and say, "Stop,"

and I would stop taking pictures.

And then, my translator left.

So there I was, I couldn't speak a word of Korean,

and this is the first night I met Hyun-Sook.

Her mother was still alive.

Her mother was not raising her, her grandmother was raising her.

And what struck me immediately was

how in love the two of these people were.

The grandmother was incredibly fond, deeply in love with this little girl.

They slept on the floor at night.

The way they heat their homes in Korea is to put bricks under the floors,

so the heat actually radiates from underneath the floor.

Hyun-Sook was 11 years old.

I had photographed, as I said, a lot of these kids.

Hyun-Sook was in fact the fifth child that I found to photograph.

And almost universally, amongst all the kids,

they were really psychologically damaged by

having been made fun of, ridiculed, picked on and been rejected.

And Korea was probably the place I found

to be the worst for these kids.

And what struck me immediately in meeting Hyun-Sook

was how confident she appeared to be,

how happy she seemed to be in her own skin.

And remember this picture,

because I'm going to show you another picture later,

but you can see how much she looks like her grandmother,

although she looks so Western.

I decided to follow her to school.

This is the first morning I stayed with her.

This is on the way to school.

This is the morning assembly outside her school.

And I noticed that she was clowning around.

When the teachers would ask questions,

she'd be the first person to raise her hand.

Again, not at all shy or withdrawn,

or anything like the other children that I'd photographed.

Again, the first one to go to the blackboard to answer questions.

Getting in trouble for whispering into her best friend's ears

in the middle of class.

And one of the other things that I said to her through the translator --

again, this thing about saying stop -- was to not pay attention to me.

And so, she really just completely ignored me most of the time.

I noticed that at recess, she was the girl

who picked the other girls to be on her team.

It was very obvious, from the very beginning, that she was a leader.

This is on the way home.

And that's North Korea up along the hill.

This is up along the DMZ.

They would actually cover the windows every night, so that light couldn't be seen,

because the South Korean government has said for years

that the North Koreans may invade at any time.

So there's always this -- the closer you were to North Korea, the more terrifying it was.

Very often at school, I'd be taking pictures,

and she would whisper into her girlfriends' ears,

and then look at me and say, "Stop."

And I would stand at attention, and all the girls would crack up,

and it was sort of a little joke.

(Laughter)

The end of the week came and my translator came back,

because I'd asked her to come back,

so I could formally thank the grandmother and Hyun-Sook.

And in the course of the grandmother talking to the translator,

the grandmother started crying.

And I said to my translator, "What's going on, why is she crying?"

And she spoke to the grandmother for a moment,

and then she started getting tears in her eyes.

And I said, "OK, what did I do? What's going on?

Why is everyone crying?"

And the translator said, "The grandmother says

that she thinks she's dying,

and she wants to know if you would take Hyun-Sook to America with you."

And I said, "I'm 28 years old, and I live in hotels,

and I'm not married."

I mean I had fallen in love with this girl,

but I -- you know, it was, like, emotionally I was about 12 years old.

If you know of photographers, the joke is

it's the finest form of delayed adolescence ever invented.

"Sorry, I have to go on an assignment, I'll be back" --

and then you never come back.

So, I asked the translator why she thought she was dying.

Can I get her to a hospital? Could I pay to get her a doctor?

And she refused any help at all.

And so, when I got outside,

I actually gave the translator some money and said,

"Please go back and see if you can do something."

And I gave the grandmother my business card.

And I said, "If you're serious, I will try to find a family for her."

And I immediately wrote a letter to my best friends

in Atlanta, Georgia, who had an 11-year-old son.

And my best friend had mistakenly one day

said something about wishing he had another child.

So here my friends Gene and Gail had not heard from me in about a year,

and suddenly I was calling, saying "I'm in Korea,

and I've met this extraordinary girl."

And I said, "The grandmother thinks she's sick,

but I think maybe we would have to bring the grandmother over also."

And I said, "I'll pay for the ... " I mean, I had this whole sort of picture.

So anyway, I left.

And my friends actually said they were very interested in adopting her.

And I said, "Look, I think I'll scare the grandmother to death,

if I actually write to her and tell her

that you're willing to adopt her, I want to go back and talk to her."

But I was off on assignment.

I figured I'd come back in a couple of weeks and talk to the grandmother.

And on Christmas Day,

I was in Bangkok with a group of photographers

and got a telegram -- back in those days, you got telegrams --

from Time magazine saying someone in Korea had died,

and left their child in a will to me.

Did I know anything about this?

Because I hadn't told them what I was doing,

because I was so upset with the story they'd run.

So, I went back to Korea, and I went back to Hyun-Sook's village,

and she was gone.

And the house that I had spent time in was empty.

It was incredibly cold.

No one in the village would tell me where Hyun-Sook was,

because the grandmother had always hidden her from Westerners.

And they had no idea about this request that she'd made of me.

So I finally found Myung Sung,

her best friend that she used to play with after school every day.

And Myung Sung, under some pressure from me and the translator,

gave us an address on the outside of Seoul.

And I went to that address and knocked on the door,

and a man answered the door.

It was not a very nice area of Seoul,

as there were mud streets outside of it.

And I knocked on the door, and Hyun-Sook answered the door,

and her eyes were bloodshot, and she seemed to be in shock.

She didn't recognize me -- there was no recognition whatsoever.

And this man came to the door and kind of barked something in Korean.

And I said to the translator, "What did he say?"

And she said, "He wants to know who you are."

And I said, "Well, tell him that I am a photographer."

I started explaining who I was, and he interrupted.

And she said, "He says he knows who you are, what do you want?"

I said, "Well, tell him that I was asked

by this little girl's grandmother to find a family for her."

And he said, "I'm her uncle, she's fine, you can leave now."

So I was -- you know, the door was being slammed in my face,

it's incredibly cold, and I'm trying to think,

"What would the hero do in a movie,

if I was writing this as a movie script?"

So I said, "Listen, it's really cold, I've come a very long way,

do you mind if I just come in for a minute? I'm freezing."

So the guy kind of reluctantly let us in and we sat down on the floor.

And as we started talking, I saw him yell something,

and Hyun-Sook came and brought us some food.

And I had this whole mental picture of, sort of like Cinderella.

I sort of had this picture of this incredibly wonderful,

bright, happy little child, who now appeared to be very withdrawn,

being enslaved by this family.

And I was really appalled, and I couldn't figure out what to do.

And the more I tried talking to him, the less friendly he was getting.

So I finally decided, I said "Look," --

this is all through the translator, because, this is all,

you know, I don't speak a word of Korean --

and I said, "Look, I'm really glad that Hyun-Sook has a family to live with.

I was very worried about her.

I made a promise to her grandmother, your mother, that I would find a family,

and now I'm so happy that you're going to take care of her."

I said, "But you know, I bought an airline ticket,

and I'm stuck here for a week."

And I said, "I'm staying in a hotel downtown.

Would you like to come and have lunch tomorrow?

And you can practice your English." Because he told me --

I was trying to ask him questions about himself.

And so I went to the hotel, and I found two older Amerasians.

A girl whose mother had been a prostitute,

and she was a prostitute,

and a boy who'd been in and out of jail.

And I said to them, "Look, there's a little girl

who has a tiny chance of getting out of here and going to America."

I said, "I don't know if it's the right decision or not,