Now a marketing researcher in Minneapolis, Reinbold, 32, chic and beautiful in head-to-toe black, was a stark contrast to the dancers in their Crayola-colored garb. The show prompted a memory of her visit to Korea in 2002, after she'd graduated from college.

"All my birth relatives, and they were so lovely and caring, were worried" about the way she dressed. "So they fitted me in order to make me a custom outfit -- and they wanted it in bright stripes, in every color of the rainbow," she said. And they wanted her to wear bright red lipstick, too. "They kept telling me that, as a 25-year-old, I looked too matronly."

Reinbold is among the Korean Americans who have the opportunity this weekend to reconnect with their native culture. She'll be working 9 to 5 today, helping dress models at Passport to Korea, which runs this weekend at the mall and offers demonstrations of cuisine, music, dance and fashion. The first-ever event, sponsored by the South Korean government, is highlighted by a 4 p.m. performance today by the acclaimed B-Boys break dancers.

Passport to Korea was organized by the Network of Professional Adopted Koreans (NoPAK), a group of Korean adoptees in the Twin Cities area, which has the nation's largest population of adopted Korean children. More than half of the 35,000 Koreans in Minnesota, it's estimated, are transnational adoptees. Since the Korean War, more than 200,000 Korean children have been adopted by Americans.

Culture shock and stereotypes

Reinbold was a fifth-grader who spoke some English when -- with her two sisters, Megan and Kate, then 13 and 8 -- she made the leap from Inchon to Henning, near Fergus Falls. Her mother had died of cancer, and her overwhelmed, financially struggling father -- who also had a 15-year-old daughter and a 5-year-old son -- feared he would never find a new wife willing to inherit a brood of five.

So when an agency arranged for the Reinbold sisters to be placed together -- in the home of a banker and his wife in Henning -- her birth father accepted the offer, albeit with ambivalence.

"I am really, really happy they let us go and I've had the life I've had, but I am sad for him," Reinbold said. "He's always been sad he couldn't keep us. He did remarry, but that didn't last long; my stepmother wasn't kind to our little brother."

The adoption was idyllic; Reinbold and her sisters landed in a close-knit, doting family with two brothers: "Maybe because my father was successful and well-liked in town, we were really well adjusted. We played every sport, all three of us went to college; we just had every opportunity. We really never experienced racism in Henning."

But Reinbold says that as an adult she does encounter the occasional stereotype -- the "Lotus Blossom" expectation that Asian women will be submissive and exotic.

"Some people do expect me to be passive, which I find pretty funny," she said. "I could hardly be that -- as a market researcher -- when most of my clients are older and successful and male.

"There simply always will be a few people who see my ethnicity first, and it's annoying," she said. Some men want to date her strictly because she's Asian, she said, while others rule her out for the same reason. "I can usually tell who's seeking an Asian woman, and those are the people I eliminate."

In the 1950s, the majority of Korean children put up for adoption were biracial. In the '60s and '70s, most were adopted because of poverty. And in the '80s, adoptions still increased because, even as the Korean economy grew, so did premarital sex and a lack of accountability by birth fathers. Then as now, Korean children "born out of wedlock" were stigmatized. Even the adoption of Korean babies by Koreans is often clandestine: Families often either fake a pregnancy or move to a new neighborhood with the new baby.

Many of those biracial babies born in the '50s, like Susan Soonkeum Cox, were the children of Korean women and U.S. soldiers. Cox, now a vice president at Holt International Children's Services, an adoption agency in Eugene, Ore., is an expert on Korean adoption. Had she stayed in Korea, she said, she would have been stigmatized as a "mixed-race illegitimate Korean war orphan."

But even though her adoption was decades ago, Cox, 56, is still queried about her adoption and her ancestors. "I am still asked, 'Who are your real parents?' 'Who is your real mom?' 'Who is your real dad?'

"And so, a lot of times, to the last question, I will say: '[Gen.] Douglas MacArthur.'"

John Perry of Eden Prairie, president of NoPAK, is a Korean adoptee himself who has adopted two Korean children and met hundreds more through his community activism.

"Going through the life-altering experience of transnational adoption has made us resilient in life," said Perry, 40. "We can take the bumps and bruises."

Perry believes most of his peers have also fared well because of the unyieldingly stringent standards employed by the Korean government. "Many of us were sent to the upper-middle class," he said, "to two-parent adoptive families who were young, financially comfortable, had strong marriages and were mentally and emotionally healthy."

Because Korean adoptees are more assimilated in the mainstream culture than clannish, there is a varying degree of interest in genealogy, Cox said.

"Some have a great desire to find their roots, and others have no interest. If they've had the privilege of having a great adoptive family and a great life, sometimes there is a disconnect to the native culture -- which is why an event like Passport to Korea is so good," Cox said.

"It was put together for the Korean government by an adoptee [Perry] who has had the adoption experience, has grown up and now wants to share his culture," she said. "Whatever your level of interest, it is moving and educational.

"It builds a bridge."

Kate McCarthy is a Minneapolis freelance writer. She can be reached at Kathleenmfreeman@comcast.net.