miss saigon and other myths about adoption: remembering Hyunsu

Hyunsu's memorial, via Jane Jeong Trenka

I have been so full of grief recently, since story of Hyunsu broke - the 3 year old adopted Korean boy murdered by his adoptive father in Maryland.

There have been many excellent blog posts about this case already, but I have not been ready to write until now. Even this post feels...disjointed and rambling.

Where do I begin?

We call him 현수 but we may never know the name his mother gave him. Our agencies like to give us new names to better sever us from our pasts. There is a logic here - "clean slate" babies are easier to place. Easier to place means more adoptions. More adoptions means more profits. Additionally, the adoptees' past is fabricated - fictions about anonymous abandonment, false names, dates and places - to discourage reunions. Reunions, and adoptees with any connection to their homeland threaten to upset the system that keeps the golden goose laying eggs. More babies equals more profits. You can now browse a photo catalog of "waiting children" on Holt's website. This is a business.

And Hyunsu's mother, his 어머니, may never learn of her child's fate. Holt, Hyunsu's Korean agency, had previously stated in the aftermath of the Sueppel murders that birth mothers would not be notified in less they inquired with the agency as to the status of their children. Hyunsu's mother may still be hoping her child is living a better life than she could provide. Or perhaps she has seen his photo in the news, blurry and turned away, and wondered if that was her son. Maybe she felt Brian O'Callaghan's death blows like they were dealt to her own heart, because the bond between mother and child can be that strong.

I mourn for Hyunsu as if he was my own little brother, 동생. He was a part of the adoptee family, and as his 형 I wonder why I didn't protect him. Why wasn't I fighting harder? Could I, and others like me, have prevented his death? I grieve for myself and and for all adoptees, because Hyunsu's short, painful life makes our stories more real. It does away with any lingering doubts about being "better off" or any questions as to the insatiable greed of adoption agencies. The public response - news articles that highlight Brian O'Callaghan's government job and military commendations dismiss the value of Hyunsu's life. Holt's own misdirection about Mongolian spots (birthmarks), hydrocephalous and "waiting for the verdict" in a corrupt legal system typifies their scrambling to protect their own financial interests in maintaining an pretty picture of adoption. Brian O'Callaghan's post-homicide actions of donating his son's organs and then bragging about it on his facebook page reveals a lot about the value he placed on his son's life (and death). If you read the comments (and never, read the comments) you will find many accusations being flung at adoptees, in particular, that we should be grateful that our adopters didn't murder us, too.

Adoptee's lives - our whole lives, not just the ones our agencies fabricated, not just the ones that begin when we are adopted - matter. And so do our deaths.

The TRACK blog recently posted a list of 13 Korean adoptees murdered by their adoptive parents. This is an incomplete list, but it is too much. Just one is too much.

Adoptees also have a disproportionately high rate of suicide and suicide attempts. One of Harry Holt's adopted children, his son Joseph, committed suicide at the age of 32. As one of the first ever Korean adoptees - he is probably the first to take his own life. Sadly, he was not the last. We will never know his reasons, but as one of the many adoptees who has attempted suicide, this strikes a far too familiar and painful chord for me.

A recent (2013) study in Minnesota found, in a three year time period, adoptees were 4 times more likely to attempt suicide. Yet the researchers still insisted that this was good news, as "the majority of adoptees are psychologically healthy." This keeps the system moving. It keeps the picture pretty and the babies coming and the parents buying and we, the adoptees, are left to fend for ourselves.

The entire transracial adoption machine is complicit in our deaths, and near deaths.

Adoptees lives matter. And so do our deaths.

The whole thing is a little "Miss Saigon". By which I mean, racism, Orientalism, misogyny, ableism, classism, white supremacy, American/Western supremacy and plain ole greed fuel the international adoption industry. It tells us that it better to be killed by your adoptive family than to live with your family of origin. Just check out this quote from the "Dear Friends" letter Harry Holt sent out to recruit adoptive families when he started Korean adoption (and overseas adoption as a whole):

“We would ask all of you who are Christians to pray to God that He will give us the wisdom and the strength and the power to deliver his little children from the cold and misery and darkness of Korea into the warmth and love of your homes.”

Unwed mothers in Korea who choose to raise their children face very real challenges. But they believe in their decision and are working to change the system from the inside. 

As I weep and grieve for Hyunsu, I am more determined than ever to break apart this broken system and fight, for Hyunsu, for myself, for all of us.

the waiting game

a brief timeline of my birth family search:

august 11, 2010 - attempted to initiate birth family search through ESWS

august 20, 2010 - referred by ESWS to local agency, Love the Children

august 23, 2010 - started search through Love the Children

february 9, 2011 - contacted Love the Children for update, no response

may 23, 2011 - contacted Love the Children fo update

may 25, 2011 - response from Love the Children saying they sent my request to Korea in march, 7 months after i requested a search

may 16, 2013 - started search with KAS

sept 5, 2013 - KAS located my birth mother

sept 23, 2013 - contacted Love the Children for update

sept 24, 2013 - response from Love the Children saying they have heard nothing and that I should contact ESWS and KAS directly

sept 25, 2013 - contacted KAS for update and submitted forms to ESWS

dec 1, 2013 - submitted forms (again) to KAS

dec 10, 2013 - KAS notified me that they located my birth mother. referred to ESWS to establish contact.

dec 15, 2013 - contacted by ESWS about exchanging letters with my birth mother

jan 3, 2014 - i sent my first letter (translated, in PDF form) to my birth mother via ESWS

yes, you read that right, KAS located my birth mother in September of 2013, but did not inform me until december, after i had sent two emails to check the status of my search.

i was foolish to trust my agency, Love the Children. i don't believe that they took any action on my search, and what little contact i had from them was very dismissive. KAS seems to be a mess, but at least they did their job. sort of.

the point is, today i am again waiting. and in the grand scheme of things, the three years i searched (or even the twenty five years it took me to start searching) were relatively short in adoptee search time. some people get responses in weeks, months. others like me, in years. others, decades, or never.

i'm waiting for my first letter back. i'm waiting to know her name. maybe see her face. find out something - anything more than the flat black type of my adoption forms that has been staring me back in the face all these years. 

but i am afraid. i am afraid she took one look at my fat body and decided that she didn't want to know me. i'm afraid that another family member found out about me and now she is unable to contact me. i'm afraid of her own shame keeping her from contacting me. i'm afraid of her own fear.

in truth, this delay could be for any number of completely innocuous reasons. i'm terrible at keeping up with letters. and this isn't exactly an easy letter to write. i have had the freedom to be completely open with most everyone in my life about communicating with my birth mother. she does not have such support. i was able to have a dear 누니 translate my letter for me. but my mother's letter will have to be translated by ESWS. the new year just passed. she could have been sick. or just busy. it could be ESWS dragging their feet. anything.

but i do not know how to be the child not abandoned.

and so i am trapped, again, in limbo. waiting. another day, another week, another month. my heart quickens every time i see i have a new email. the let down when it's nothing more than a store newsletter. the dread, that when news does come, it will be bad news. that she will not want to know me. i am waiting for rejection. i am waiting to be abandoned again.

i'm finding it hard to be present these days. i'm finding even scars long healed are aching. it is hard not to fold inside myself completely. retreat to somewhere safe.

i'm working more hours than my body can physically sustain, but it's the only way i will get to Korea. i know it's just another way of hiding. i keep having nightmares that i'm leaving the next day, but that i'm not ready. that i have been so focused on earning the money i need to go that i haven't done any of the emotional preparation. i'm going to bed the night before my flight, crying and saying "i don't want to go" but everything pushes me to leave. it's terrifying.

so here i am, waiting.

SURVIVING: a reflection on Woody, Soon-Yi and me

content warning: references to rape, abuse, eating disorders, self injury, mental health, suicide

as a young Korean adoptee, I was horrified when I learned that Woody Allen had married his girlfriend's adopted Korean daughter. in 1997 I was 12 years old. there was seemingly no controversy around it. and I, barely a teenager, had already been asked by a family friend if I was my older brother's wife. I had already learned that my best asset was my exotic Asian sexuality. I had already heard "Asian chicks are so hot" or "I love Asian chicks" or "Asian chicks are better cuz their pussy is slanted" or some variation thereof about a million times. 

I needed someone to tell me that this was wrong. I needed a parent to look me  in the eye and tell me that I was more than that. I didn't know at the time that he had not adopted her (not hat this makes his actions any less heinous): all I knew was that she was like me. she was just like me. and now she was married to her dad and everyone thought that was ok because they weren't blood, because she was young and Asian. and that this was one more way in which my only purpose in life was to be sexually available to white men. this was acceptable to my family, to the world.

a daughter just like me. the first adult adoptee I'd ever even seen or heard about. a life like mine. this is how it ends. this is what you're good for.

for clarification, I'm not sure why it matters that Soon-Yi wasn't *his* adopted daughter? or even that they are not blood related? I think it does matter that she is adopted if only because adoptees come with a special constellation of insecurities! experiences! fears! and vulnerabilities! that can be exploited by abusers and predators. but really, having a sexual relationship with a young person when you have even a semi-parental relationship with them is fucking creepy. as a parental figure, he had a responsibility to not be a creeper. as Mia Farrow's partner, he had a responsibility to not be an asshole. and as a human being in any sort of relationship with adoptee, he had a responsibility to not manipulate and exploit those raw and painful edges.

I can tell you who I was when I was 19. I had graduated top of my high school class and had been accepted at a prestigious liberal arts college. I had a charming, intelligent and athletic boyfriend who everyone loved and thought was wonderful. I weighed 98 pounds, I was conventionally beautiful. 

I had also had an eating disorder since I was 12. I was a self-injurer* and diagnosed bipolar and had been on psychiatric medication since I was 15. I'd been institutionalized. my senior year of high school I was home tutored because of a severe psychotic depressive episode. I dropped out of college mid semester due to a mental breakdown. 

this is about being young and adopted. with a heart, head and body that don't fit together. with no where to put all this pain except down my own throat, swallowed, as guilt and shame. about looking for love in all the wrong places because it was never in the right ones, because the same faces that told me to go back to china on the playground tucked me in at night and my adoptive family never gave me a way to deal, because to them, to admit racism exists would break their entire reality into a million, glaring pieces.

my boyfriend, charming and well-liked - I thought he was my savior. adoptees are always told that we need saviors. my ticket to happiness, to normalcy. he gave me currency with my adoptive family. to be with him was to demonstrate that I was "growing up" and "getting better" from the ungrateful teenager who made trouble for fun. I thought that we would get married and I would no longer be something so terrible.

but let me tell you the truth of that relationship. over the course of 5 years, he abused me physically, sexually and psychologically. emotional abuse, constant shaming, belittling, gaslighting and manipulation, he broke me down, keeping me as mentally unstable as possible, keeping me on the verge of suicide for years. it made me easier to control. easier to break. easier to use.

(but he's another story altogether.)

if had told people who knew him when it was happening, they wouldn't have believed me. he was more trustworthy than me, more believable than me. I didn't believe myself for a long time, either.

I doubt most of our old friends would believe me even now.

seven years later I am still healing the trauma of that relationship. I am finally at the point where I'm no longer afraid of him - no longer fear his ability to break me down - and I am through making excuses for his rape and abuse. but that doesn't mean that there are no traces of his violence left in my body and brain and the memory that connects it all.

as an adoptee, I think it is hard to not have extreme power differentials in relationships. our relationships with our adoptive parents are vastly different than the relationships our adoptive parents have with non adopted siblings, despite everyone saying they are the same. I was already telling myself that my feelings were irrational and wrong. I was already believing others when they told me that things were okay that were not ok. I was already used to being the problem, with an uncanny ability to read the minds of others and perform to meet their desires. this is how I survived.

in high school, I remember talking to a (white, male) friend in the hallway. I hung out with this friend because he had told me I was basically his wet dream come true. 

he never actually wanted to date me, of course. 

but I digress.

we were standing in the hallway when a friend (white, male) of his came up to him. he looked at me, and then back at his friend, and asked "who's the chink?"

I said nothing. I think I laughed. I didn't even think to be offended anymore. to me, being called chink felt like love. being fetishized felt like love. that is how deeply I had been warped by my early experiences as a transracial adoptee.

that white boy and I? after that day, we were good friends.

in my life, this is all compounded by race, gender, size and disability. it was easy for me to feel unlovable, undeserving. it was easy for me to feel that I had to perform worthiness. perform whiteness. perform to meet the needs and desires of white men. outside of being fetishized, I didn't know how to exist. that was all I had ever been given. 

the rest of me, the truth of me, was too much. too ugly, too damaged, too heavy a burden. attaching myself to a white man seemed like the only way to escape the shamefulness of my truth, of my self.

and again, we are back to Soon-Yi. my first mirror to the future. 

where was the outrage then? where was someone, anyone, to tell me that the sickness this gave me in my stomach was deserved? to tell me to listen to my instincts, that the men who felt dangerous probably were? that this is not what love should feel like?

as new controversy stirs around Dylan Farrow, and Woody Allen's legacy and everyone's bullshit defense of him feeling like a stab through my 12-year-old heart, this rage and sadness and terror rises back inside me. 

 

this is the story of a different legacy. 

* I hate all the terms associated with self-injury so that's why I'm using a term I find fucked up. 

on hallyu, adoption and the (mis)naming of this blog

Gyeongbokgung Palace, summer 2009

first up: this week's thank yous! lots of love to: Lynne, Sunny, all the folks who have pledged anonymously and everyone who has liked, shared and signal boosted! thank you so much for the love and support. you all rock!

there's still time to help me get to Korea this fall! check it out!


on hallyu, adoption and the (mis)naming of this blog

i did not come to K-pop because of the Hallyu wave. i came to it because i am Korean. i had caught tiny glimpses of it when i visited in 2009, but i was too overwhelmed and anxious to make sense of it until months later. and while the Hallyu wave has certainly made Korean pop culture more easily accessible to me, it is equally frustrating. because suddenly, random white people watch more k-dramas than i do and want to argue that BIGBANG is waaaaaay better than Super Junior and i really. just. cannot.

honestly, the struggle for me to even google "k-pop bands" four years ago, months after returning from my first trip home. the feelings of shame and embarrassment that i had to look it up. that it wasn't something i could just naturally absorb or maybe it was altogether something i could not, should not, try to claim. or it felt so petty. the superficial trappings of Korean culture. I was too ashamed to ask for it when I had been in an English language bookstore in Seoul. 

any reason. all the reasons. 

as an adoptee, it's hard to not feel like a fraud.

but what i found changed my life. and that is very real.

i love pop music. i tend towards popstar obsession. i had a fairly intense Hanson obsession was a teenager. in college i rediscovered NSYNC and Justin Timberlake and 90s pop in general as i started drag performance. i enjoy lots of other music as well, but dance pop just makes me (& my hips) happy. go ahead. judge me.

but it is having idols that looked like me that drew me in. idols that looked like something i wanted to be and could be. that is life changing.

at the time, i was surrounded by white, transmasculine dfab queers. i tried really hard to fit into their definition. i shaved my head and bound my chest and wore polo shirts and baggy shorts. i gave away all of my jewelry and threw away my makeup and tried to force my fat, femme brownness into a scheme of desirability that i would never be allowed access too. i felt like i had to lose weight in order to be legitimately genderqueer.  that the fact that wearing low cut necklines made me feel sexy meant that i was just a dilettante pretending to be genderqueer because i thought it was trendy. i never felt welcome by the trans community at my college.

when i was young, i idolized Trini from the Power Rangers and Claudia from The Babysitter's Club because they were the only other Asian American women in my life. the only ones i'd ever seen. I cosplayed Lucy Liu's character in Charlie's Angels. when planning a Disney-themed event everyone immediately decided that I should be Mulan. I wasn't any of these things, nor was I Long Duk Dong or any other racist caricature of Asian men. I was not a martial arts expert or a computer geek. I was shapeless, groundless.

I have heard other adoptees speak of the cognitive dissonance between what we see in our heads and what we see in the mirror. recently, I looked at one of my baby pictures, and I could finally, for the first time, see myself in my own face. perhaps I had internalized the belief that "Asians all look alike", or maybe i had just always felt like a shapeshifter: always reflecting back someone else's idea of what I was. 

in idol boys, in 꽃미남, i discovered a way to exist. to be not a girl and still wear eyeliner. to wear eyeliner on eyes like mine. i found a new way of imagining androgyny with my cheeks and lips and nose and eyes and texture of hair. i found tight pants and mystery chests and studs and spikes and lace and fishnet and pleather and desire. i found something i wanted to be and to have.

i had never known how to desire myself before.
to see and to be seen.

i did not find fat acceptance in k-pop. but i found racial and gender familiarity. i found the freedom to be something other than what whiteness told me i should be. life is a process. i filled my tumblr dash with k-pop boys and fat femmes of color and somewhere in between i found myself. 

and this is why this blog truly, has nothing to do with hallyu.

I struggle with white folks and other folks of color for this reason. I have literally been in a lifelong battle with myself and everyone around me to figure out my relationship to Korea. it is still unsure, still fraught, still easily troubled and it will never be an absolute. it was so hard for me. and yet others, with no relationship to Korea whatsoever, pick up k-pop so easily, so freely. and often in a gross, imperialist manner.

one of the many the privileges of white supremacy is never questioning your constellation of skin tone and features as being sexually desirable and sexually revered. when I looked into k-pop, into Korea, into my own racial group as something to aspire to and desire, I did so at my own peril.

when I dared to believe I was beautiful, it changed everything. it challenged everything. 

Hallyu wave has made korean pop culture consumable. in that sense, I benefitted from the Hallyu wave. when I finally found the strength and need to look for it, there was a lot of information readily available in English. YouTube videos, online shopping portals, international fan forums - it was all there at my fingertips. SM Entertainment artists did US concerts I was able to attend. I don't know if I could have done it if it had been harder. it is so easy to give up on korean things when they are hard. it just hurts less that way.

and K-pop has helped me in other ways. listening to music and watching variety shows has helped my language learning and inspired a lot of curiosity about culture, history and food. it sounds strange, I'm sure, but it's true. it was a way in to something that previously felt completely inaccessible.

when I named this blog, it was meant to be more about the ways I incorporate korean things into my life. cooking, our cute collection of house slippers, fashion, beauty products, etc. in that sense, I think "Hallyu" was more relevant. 

but now, it has taken a new form. it is about my journey - my Saturn return, my homeland return, my return to family of origin, my return to language. perhaps it should be titled "home is where the 한국 is".

in some ways, the 80s really mark the first Korean wave. this was the peak of Korean adoption, when i was packaged and exported internationally for economic gain. at its peak, it worked out to 25 babies per day being sent overseas. all to be consumed by whiteness, owned because someone paid for us, the same as Hallyu today. 

I treasure these bits of Korean culture that Hallyu has given me access to. to me, they are precious. I do not own them; we are kin. and they inspire me to live true and without apology. they inspire me to learn and discover and challenge myself. they are a beginning, an opening. and I am grateful.

so maybe, the name of this blog isn't totally wrong. it's just not the whole story. not yet.