FORTUNE -- Ask Corey Gordon how old he is and he couldn't tell you, because he has no birth certificate. His childhood was fragmented, just as his memories of it are.
He says he vaguely remembers an older woman taking care of him in his infancy, but she wasn't his mother. He remembers being cold and walking barefoot on ice. He remembers going hungry, and being so malnourished that when he coughed, he had to pull worms out of his mouth.
The abandoned child of a Korean woman and an American soldier who met during the Korean War, Gordon was, like so many children of such unions, ostracized. His mother abandoned him, and he might have been forced to survive on the streets had he not been delivered to an orphanage, where he experienced his first shower, food security and kids his own age to play with. He recalls the day an orphanage staffer told him he'd been adopted by a family in Minnesota. "It was a dream come true. All I wanted to be was to be American," Gordon says.
Adjusting to the dream, and his new surroundings, would be tough for Gordon. "On my first day of school I ran away because I thought I was being given away. My parents had to come with me to school for several weeks so I could realize that I could come home every day," Gordon recalls.
read more: http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2014/05/30/from-consulting-to-consoling/
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