When his mum returned, she made sure Milton was never left alone again. Each time she got wind of a police raid, she would drop Milton at an orphanage for a couple of weeks so that he was safe.
Milton remembers being racially abused by the other, mostly Korean, kids at these orphanages, as he had been in the village growing up. But this time, he didn’t let it get to him.
“I would almost laugh it off,” he says. “‘Yeah, I may be these racial slurs that you’re talking about – but you’re the orphan. I have a mother, she says she’s going to be back in two weeks.’ And she was always back in two weeks.”
For a while, this routine continued. Then one morning, Milton and his mum took a taxi to a different orphanage, where many of the children looked like Milton. It was an orphanage for children born to American servicemen and Korean mothers, called the St Vincent’s home for Amerasian children.
Milton’s mum assured him she’d be back the following day and promised him a present – he asked for a train set. But when she returned there was no train set, just a hug that he didn’t know meant goodbye.
“She told me, ‘I need you to be strong,'” he says. “That was the last time I saw her.”
