The earliest photo Joo-Rei Mathieson has of herself was taken when she was about four. Her head is shaved, her eyes cast downward. She has just arrived at perhaps the worst place a child could be sent in South Korea.
The black-and-white mugshot is from a November 1982 Brothers Home intake document that describes Mathieson as a lost street kid brought in by police. It notes, chillingly for a government-sponsored vagrants’ facility that survivors have told The Associated Press often worked children to death, that she's “capable of labor.”
