Mary Bowers left Los Angeles with a career building secure infrastructure for the U.S. government, a world ranking in competitive eating, and an adoption file that never quite added up. What she found in Korea was something else entirely — a falsified identity and a paper trail leading directly into one of the largest human rights scandals in modern history.
DISCOVER![[background image] image of a film set for a film production company](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6a0119a4d3badd55b016ac74/6a0288407d9ea630972b75d7_Mary_Seoul_Rain.avif)
Parents were told they were adopting orphans. They were not. Records were falsified. Identities were fabricated, erased, and reassigned. Children were acquired, processed, and exported to meet international demand — with the full knowledge of the Korean state.
What begins as one woman's search for the truth becomes a decades-long trail of falsified records, stolen identities, and a global child trafficking network that operated with full government approval.
The past is never over. The history of tomorrow is happening now.
Mary Bowers grew up in Greeley, Colorado, where she learned to ride horses long before she learned to parallel park. An imaginative kid in a complicated world, she found her truest companions in animals and her richest life in her own mind.
She channeled that imagination into architecture, managing $6.1 billion in construction for the United States government. Traveling between airports and border crossings she helped build, she developed an in-depth understanding of how institutions move people, process documents, and shape lives. Truth, for Mary, has always been foundational. Nothing sustainable is built on a lie, whether the structure is a building or a legal process.
Searching for the truth about her own origins led her to co-found EARS (입양기록·권리회복연대), an international coalition of adoptees dedicated to preserving records and restoring rights. Her essay on the status of transnational adoptees was included in a briefing to the United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances, and she has spoken at the National Assembly of Korea.
Along the way, she also became one of the most recognized personalities in competitive eating, rising to number one in South Korea and becoming the first athlete to represent her birth country at the Nathan's Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest. Her appetite, it turns out, has always been for more than food.
For Mary, family has always been worth crossing the world to find.
Bobby Silva grew up on the island of Oahu, in Hawaii. He would trek across the island arriving at school at 6am as a scholarship student to earn his place — and leaving with a work ethic that has defined everything since.
He studied political science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa with plans for law school, until stunt work pulled him in a different direction. He spent years as an actor and stuntman on major Hollywood productions, including being handpicked by Clint Eastwood for Million Dollar Baby, before stepping behind the camera to build a second career as a producer and casting director.
As an Emmy-nominated casting producer, Bobby has worked with NBC, Amazon Prime, and other major platforms. His instinct has always been the same — find the people with the most compelling story to tell, and build the framework that lets them tell it.
He is a husband and father of two who believes the best stories are the ones we live.