Ms Kimberley, 54, and her mother, Yokluen Chankaew, 79, hugged each other upon their meeting this afternoon, which was arranged by local administrators.
According to Kimberley, she was born in Ta Kua Pa district of Phang Nga district, in 1960 to Yokluen, and an Australian manager of a mine. The birth certificate provided by Kimberley identified her as Tukta Chankaew, the Thai name given to her at the time of birth by her parents.
Ms Yokluen said a British engineer who worked for the mine and his wife later asked to adopt her when she was four years old. Ms Yokluen told reporters she decided to give up Ms Kimberley, then known as Tukta, to the engineer because she was in poverty.
"I thought I couldn’t raise her up into a comfortable life," Ms Yokluen said, adding that the British engineer and his wife, who were childless, soon left the country for the United Kingdom, and she never heard from them again.
Ms Yokluen said she was surprised to be told by a local official that she was going to meet Ms Kimberley again after over 50 years of silence. "I didn't expect to ever see my daughter again," she said emotionally.
Ms Kimberley said she had been aware in the past 30 years that her biological mother was a Thai woman, but she did not know how to find Ms Yokluen's whereabouts. However, Ms Kimberley said, she eventually decided to travel to Thailand for the first time in her life in September to look for her mother.
Her quest initially ran into obstacles because she committed a common foreigners' mistake, confusing the name of Phang Nga province on the Andaman Sea with Pha Ngan Island in the Gulf of Thailand.
"I ended up on Pha Ngan, but luckily a clerk at the hotel where I stayed on Pha Ngan gave me a lot of help and sought out all the information," Kimberley said.
The clerk, Kingkaew Yoobhakdee, got in touch with local administrators in Phang Nga, who in turn discovered that Ms Yokluen had moved from Phang Nga to live in the neighbouring province of Phuket.
After several months of tracking down Ms Yokluen's residence, the officials finally arranged the fateful meeting between the Thai woman and her long-lost daughter.