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.

lies our mother(s) were told

there are great fictions in adoption, particularly in transracial, intercountry adoption. Domestic adoption, as well, is full of lies: our child welfare system is corrupt and ruled by the same racism, classism, ableism, colonialism, xenophobia and misogyny of the international adoption world. but korean adoption is where I live my life, so that is where I shall begin.

lies told to birth mothers:

you have no choice

you have a choice

your child will be better off

your child will be loved

you will be better off 

adoption agencies care about your child

your family will disown you

you cannot raise this child

god wants you to abandon your baby

you will forget

you will survive

you will feel no guilt

you cannot ever tell anyone

this is your fault

lies told to adoptive families:

it's almost as good as having your own

it's better than having your own

these babies have no baggage 

these babies are cuter/smarter/more exotic

if you adopt an Asian baby then you are Asian too

attachment issues? what are you talking about?

racism? isn't that over?

god meant for you to have this child

it's cool/trendy/humanitarian

it will be easy
adoptees feel no different than biological children

your child was anonymously abandoned/some other fiction that makes the child seem more adoptable

you don't need to know anything about race to be a good parent

I feel like these barely scratch the surface.

my parents' home study called them "cold and aloof". the local agency told them not to adopt an older child because they have too many issues and it would be too hard on their family. as an infant, I was deemed to be a clean slate with no issues as long as they fed me korean food once a year and bought me a couple of books. there was a four page typed note given to them by the adoption agency. I've tried to read it but it makes no sense. it's really just lies and excuses. it is handwritten titled "The Final  Answer". as if there was anything "final" or "answer" about what it means to be adopted.

it is a heavy load. this memory i can't recall but that lives in my bones. the feeling discarded, feeling abandoned. being an orphan before i knew what that meant. the fear of being not good enough. the way that everyone I ever met wanted to know why and how I was abandoned. elementary school teachers, friends, their parents, strangers. everyone. they all said I shouldn't feel any different. so when I did, that shame was all my own.

the conflation of racist yellow peril myths about china with korean adoption. make no mistake, these systems are different. the social issues in korea that contribute to child abandonment are different than in China. and china only started adoption in the 80s, korea has been doing it since the 50s. but don't expect white people to know that. I was told that I was lucky because Korea hated girls and I was lucky I didn't get killed by my parents or sold into slavery. I was told that I was lucky a lot.

they call us "chosen children" because never say who does the choosing.

my parents still don't understand racism. my mother thinks that because she has "always been drawn to Asian things" that means she a) isn't racist and b) is qualified to parent an Asian child. neither of these things is true.

more lies.

my father is "colorblind". he is educated and worked for a long time in business. now he writes books about business, teaches classes, gives lectures. he is used to bring the authority figure inside and outside of the home. he argues with me about the validity of my experience while also insisting I am a "white girl".

lies.

as privileged white people my parents have the luxury of dismissing anything they don't agree with by looking down their nose at it. when I sent them to an exhibit of adoptee art at the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian American Experience (sidebar: my mother insisted on calling it the "Wing Luck"), they told me after that "it wasn't a very good museum". after many hours of my crying they admitted that actually the exhibit made them feel bad and they just wanted to dismiss it.

that was the last time I ever tried to talk to them about adoption.

it was only as I wrote my first letter to my birth mother that I even thought about what life must have been like for her. it was the first time I though that she must have suffered all these years, not knowing what happened to the child she never knew.

that is one of the many lies we adoptees are told. birth mothers are painted flat and simple. a place, not a person, not a relationship. 

but birth mothers are not machines, we are not blank slates, and adoptive parents are not saviors.

and every day is to reclaim a little bit of truth.

head/heart/hurt: thoughts on the babybox

a friend recently scoffed at my suggestion that Korean adoptees had higher than average divorce rates. i don't have a shiny study to back up this claim - just my own experiences, the experiences of adoptee friends and personal observation. i know of at least two Swedish studies that show Korean adoptees have startlingly high rates of suicide and suicide attempts. i too, have personal experience with this.

the truth is, the struggles of the adoptee are complex and complicated. they may look different from person to person, but that doesn't mean they aren't real. and if you haven't been there, you just. don't. know.

i searched for three years before i found my birth mother. and that process and time broke my heart in ways i can't describe. ways i would have never predicted when i sent out my first email to my adoption agency. or the third.

but despite my struggles, i am one of the lucky few, one of a very tiny percentage that found something. found someone. i have a chance to look at a photo and see myself. and maybe, i will meet my birth mother face-to-face, or my half-siblings. no matter the outcome of our reunion (and believe me, they run the gamut) i am one of the lucky ones because i am now connected to someone. some thing.

i know so many adoptees who have been searching for much longer than me. and many of them will never find anything. or anyone. they may have had several false positives along the way, consecutive heartbreaks that i can't comprehend. they may have searched only to find what they were looking for was gone, left only with whispers from distant relatives.

but this is not a pointless ramble.

it's this babybox, you see, that has me all twisted up in knots. because it only encourages anonymous abandonment, something which is currently legally possible in Korea, but the babybox makes it final. there is no possibility for that child to ever find their family, there is no way for that mother to find out what happened to her child (because yes, birth mothers are human beings with emotions, not just uteruses that turn out cute, trendy, brown accessories for the discriminating shopper).

since the babybox's installation, the only statistic to change has been an increase in anonymous abandonment. it does not prevent infanticide. it does not save lives. it ruins lives.

i imagine, and i can't breathe. the sheer force of the suffering this babybox will cause to the generations of orphans it manufactures is unbearable. the pain i felt for three years would become a lifetime. it would become final. just imagine. but you can't. you. just. can't. unless you've been there.

we have had so much done to us. adoptees. so much taken from us. by social stigma, by neglect, by greed, by colonialism, by imperialism, by war, by sexism, by racism, by history.

many of us have been told the "anonymous abandonment" story to make us more palatable to overseas buyers. blank slates. it also discourages searching and upsetting the status quo and keeps the shady underbelly of overseas adoption hidden.

it's no coincidence that all of this press around the babybox comes hand-in-hand with efforts from the agencies to undo changes made by the Special Adoption Law. changes that, while huge, are also just baby steps towards bringing Korea's adoption industry into ethical compliance. the agencies don't want to see their gravy train of fresh, baggage-free orphans for export dry up. plain and simple. so all of this babybox media attention, the movie with it's lies and misdirection, the facebook virality, it all serves to make agencies rich on the blood and tears of unwed mothers and their babies.

(many folks, much more knowledgable and articulate than i, have written criticisms of the babybox. such as this one, by adoptee Shannon Heit. tonight, heart/hurt bursting, i just had to sit and write out some thoughts. this is by no means comprehensive or well cited.)

every child deserves to know where they came from.

the first four days and my life will never be the same

i shed my first real tear today. i got a little misty on tuesday, reading all the responses to my fb updates about finding my birth mother. i was holding someone else's 5-month old infant, strapped onto me in a carrier. she cried most of the day. she missed her mother.

my eyes got wet on wednesday evening when a reunited adoptee offered to meet for coffee and talk. she told me about her reunion, and hearing her story it began to set in. the earth shattering life altering absolutely wild incomprehensible sum total of what had just happened, what was about to just happen.

today, during the intake for a physical medicine appointment i told my doctor about my search. i told him i wanted to tell him because it was in my body but i wasn't ready to talk about it. i guess i ended up talking a bit, enough, to shed a tear. a real tear. i did not blink it back or stifle it, i let it run down my cheek. just one. the first.

on tuesday morning i got the email. it was early - i didn't have to be to work until 10 but i had to get up at 7 to take my thyroid medication, and then i could eat and shower and get ready for the hour-long commute to my nanny job. so 7 am. i had a tooth extracted the day before, my jaw was stiff and sore and my mouth still tasted of blood. i looked at my phone, as i do every morning, bleary eyed, to check my emails.

mostly it's Joann's coupons and store newsletters, but sometimes there is something worthwhile.

i saw i had an email from KAS. because of the magic of mail preview, this is what it said:

KAS

Re: Birth Family Search Request

Dear ---x---. Hello, this is Sara Yun from Korea Adoption Services. First...

i read those words and recoiled. it sounded like bad news. or at least, more of no news. i had accepted that i might not ever get an answer to my searching. i didn't really think this could be The Email. whatever it was - it was 7am and i was going to have a long week and i was not ready to read it.

after about 5 minutes, i said to myself "you ridiculous human being, what are you doing, OPEN THE FUCKING EMAIL," and so i did.

and --that-- is the moment my life changed forever.

i'm scared. i'm terrified. i'm excited. i'm feeling everything that it is possible to feel, i think, and probably a few more things. this is truly standing on the edge of the unknown. and i know, i KNOW, that whatever comes next will fuck with my heart in ways i can't even begin to anticipate. nothing will protect me from what this process will do to me. as an adoptee - nothing has been easy. nothing has been painless. but i have survived it.

and so, what choice do i have but to take a deep breath and step into the abyss.

when i started my search, i did it because i didn't want to live my life not having searched. i was only 25 but had recently met adoptees older and younger than me who done their searches only to find their mothers had already passed. this possibility had never really entered into my consciousness, and i realized that i could wait around until i was "ready" (and really, when are you ever "ready" for this?) or  do it before i ran out of chances.

i emailed my local agency on August 23, 2010 to start my search.

four days later, i sent this email to my close queer adoptee friend:

"i have started my birth family search. that's about all i have to say on the subject at the moment. they said it could take a while. but. opening."

i'm trying hard not to have expectations. i am trying to go forward with an open head and open heart for whatever may come. i'm not looking for this to "fix" me - i don't feel broken anymore.

the waiting is the worst. first, three years, countless emails, to get to here. and now, waiting again. for the next step. knowing that people who don't want me to know my birth mother are the ones in control.

whenever i get a new email i feel like i'm going to throw up. and when it isn't ESWS, when it isn't me being one.step.closer to knowing my mother's name, my heart hurts.

here i am. day four and my life will never be the same.

투쟁: language, miles, returns, stories

view from Seoul Tower, 2009

i'm going to Korea next year.

i don't know when, or how, or in what capacity, but i am going back.

my saturn return is approaching, and i have been feeling it since the summer. all signs point towards this being the time, the right time, for me. i feel compelled to go, i feel i *have* to go.

i will post A LOT more in the coming months about this journey, my reasons, my feelings, my fears and hopes and plans and all of that. today, i'm going to start with a brief history of knowing and knowledge and language and distance and shame. language study is my number one goal for this journey, and all the heartache and struggle that comes with it.

my first trip home was in 2009. i dropped out of my language class on the third day. i wasn't ready. i'd only been in the country for a week, my body was still jet-lagged, my mind was still overflowing and overwhelmed. i felt shame every time the teacher corrected my pronunciation. i was afraid to even start my homework for fear of what it would mean for me to not succeed.

back in college, i took one East Asian studies class. it was called "Gender, Modernity and Social Change in Korea". the whole thing is kind of a blur. there were Asiaphile white boys and let-me-show-you-photos-from-my-trip-to-India white girls. so many fucked up, racist, misogynist and transphobic things got said on a regular basis, and there were only three of us who actually pushed back. but i remember so vividly the shame i felt at not knowing anything about Korea or Korean history. i remember how these white people shamed me for not knowing the history of my own country. for not knowing as much as them.

and there are so many really deep and valid reasons for why I never read Bruce Cummings' book. but i couldn't shake that shame. the same shame i felt when a stranger at the airport started talking to me about Korean ondol heating and exclaimed "you don't know your own history?" at me when i didn't know what that was.

when i was younger, feeling all this difference on my face and body and hair and history (or lack thereof) and getting "ching chonged" on the playground and people always asking "is she with you" when i was at the grocery store with my mom and avoiding other Asian kids like the plague because separately we could survive, we could dodge the slurs, we had a chance of being something better, more acceptable than each other.

when i was young like this, wounds i couldn't name until a few years ago just barely beneath the surface, when the people who claimed to love me looked just like the ones who taunted me, when my mother dismissed racism as "ignorance", when i was force-fed feeling grateful and elementary school teachers publicly interrogated me about the circumstances of my birth and abandonment past the point of tears, this is when i first learned to be afraid of Korea.

i was told that Korea hated girls, and hated me because i was the child of an unmarried mother, that she had worn a girdle for her entire pregnancy to hide me, that i was her shame, but that she had given me up for a better life in america, that i had no identity in Korea, but here -

i learned to run from my reality of my country. my dark hair, my slanted eyes, my taste for spicy food - these things made me exotic. exotic was good. white people liked exotic. exotic was my pass. if i bent to their will, if i played into the sexual fantasies of every white boy and man; if i let white women ooh and ahhh over my hair, my tan; if i played diverse background dressing in the promotional photos of my private school - that was the way to survive. 

but to know any truth, to imagine myself as a part of Korea and Korean history, was too risky, too painful.

my mother bought me an elaborately rhinestoned American flag pin when i was naturalized. i wore it every Memorial Day, every 4th of July, well into high school. photos of me dressed in red, white, blue and that pin, were taken every year.

my mother always gushed about how beautiful the color red looked against my black hair.

standing in World Cup Park, 2009

i didn't know how to be Korean. i didn't know where to start. i didn't even know that i could.

one of my brother's best friends was Korean. his mother would bring me gifts from her yearly trip to the homeland, but also told my mother that i must never search, must never return. she gave me the film "Daughter of Danang" and told me point blank that real Koreans would hate me.

these are the things that make distance greater than miles and years and language.

i don't know if i can say i'm not afraid anymore. but i'm ready. 

i've set out to learn Korean many times before. but i never committed to it. the characters fell out of my head, they could not find purchase in my brain. i was too afraid of failing, too afraid i had no business learning. 

but all that has changed. little by little, bit by bit, i have found the strength. i have found the need to learn. i can hold the alphabet in my head, heart and hands, my tongue can force out fits and starts of foreign native tongue.

i want to go to Korea and learn. i want to be surrounded by the sounds of this most beautiful language, that makes my heart race and leaves me breathless, a strange and primal memory.

it is time to shed this skin of shame. it is time to write my own story with a diasporic hand.

i am going back, to learn, to live. 

i'm still afraid, but i'm ready.

"orphan stories no. 27489" on Interrupt

A little while ago I had this article published on Interrupt Magazine for their issue on race. One of the prompts was "I first realized I was x race when..." and I wrote about my experience as a transracial adoptee. Check it out here: orphan stories no. 27489

MAKING 만두: a memoir

homemade mandu frying in a pan

I.

in college, my first korean adoptee friend told me the story of being a part of one of the special events for Asian American prospective students. she said they all sat around and talked about how their mothers made dumplings. her mother didn't make dumplings.

II.

my mother did. in elementary school we made mandu for my brownie troop. i wore my hanbok and we got coolers full of green tea from the local chinese restaurant. we earned some kind of cultural badge. there were three kids of color in my entire elementary school class, including me.

III.

i learned how to make 만두 (stuffed dumplings) at Korean culture camp. i started going in first grade, i think. each age group had a different color t-shirt. first graders wore white.

the camp was run by white adoptive parents. they set the curriculum, and hired Korean Americans to help teach the classes. the camp was open to Korean adoptees and their white adoptive siblings. we rotated between different stations: music, folktales, language, brush painting, tae kwon do, fan dancing, music, games and art.

my first memory is from the art station. we made ourselves passports. 

IV.

my favorite part was always tae kwon do. every year kids would lay on the floor in a row for other campers to do flying side kicks over and break boards during the final show for parents. i was never asked to do the flying side kicks because i was fat. 

V.

back to the dumplings.

after you hit 6th grade, you were expected to help out with the younger campers instead of being one yourself. one of our duties as unpaid camp helpers was to help prepare all of the food for the end of week banquet. this included making thousands of mandu. i'm kind of an overachiever, a perfectionist, a closer. i was especially so back then. so while others would kinda cower at sticking their hands into raw egg and meat, i dove into it, striving to make the most dumplings and the most perfect dumplings and do to it faster and better than everyone else. so that is how i learned to make 만두.

VI. 

after high school i summered working for a caterer. one year we had to make 300+ empanadas for an event. the other workers were having trouble filling them and folding them. i stepped in and it all came flooding back to me. i personally filled and folded all 300 of them.

VII.

i became a vegetarian in 6th grade but i always made an exception for the food at the culture camp banquet. years later i started making veggie 만두 that were delicious and flavorful. in college i couldn't buy dumpling skins so i made the dough by hand. these dumplings were chewy and rustic. during my summer in Seoul i made dumplings with kimchi from the hasookjip where i was staying, although i ventured out to a vegetarian restaurant weekly for 만두.

VIII. 

now i have to eat mostly gluten-free for medical reasons. this year, for my birthday, my partner and my bestie tried to make me gluten free 만두. the dough was a struggle, and they couldn't fill them properly. once i started helping they turned out better, but i conclude that i can make a gluten exception for dumplings.

IX. 

also ramyeon.

X. 

last week, i made 만두 again for some friends who were coming over for dinner. it felt so right, my hands and heart moved without thinking. i filled and folded each one effortlessly. it felt like only minutes had passed and i made over 50. my partner lovingly fried them on three sides, golden brown, 맛있어요. it felt like home. warm. sweet. full.

my mother never taught me how to make dumplings. turns out, i didn't need a recipe after all.