a brief update: families, of all kinds.

I apologize for the month-long lapse in posts.there has been a lot going on - a health crisis, my partner and I arranging for our families to meet for the firs time, changes to my body that have set off some serious dysphoria...not to mention the pressure of working and saving for my Korea trip, processing the ways race, gender and "trendiness" of need functions in crowdfunding, and of course, receiving my first letter from my birth mother.

while my adoptive parents were in town, I told them about finding my birth mother. I wanted to tell them face to face. I wanted to tell them - I'm not sure why. looking back, I probably shouldn't have. my partner's family was also in town, and they were treating us really poorly, so in contrast, my parents seemed to be behaving brilliantly. anyway, I told them I was not ready to and did not want to talk about it. the next day, my mother says: "I know you said you don't want to talk about it but -" and then proceeded to tell me that they were 100% supportive and excited for me. 

she was unable to respect my wishes because she needed to center herself in my experience. she needed to reassure me (and herself) that she was a "good" and supportive adoptive parent. in order to do so, she had to violate my trust. she had to make it about her. 

she tells me that when I'm ready she is excited to hear about it. my experience serves to enrich her existence.

in an adoptee's life, it is almost never about us. our needs. our experiences. there is always someone else trying to project their narrative, their interpretation of history, onto our bodies.

perhaps you have seen a post floating around where a white adoptive mother made her adopted daughters hold up white board signs with fucked up things people have said to her about them. TO HER. ABOUT THEM. literally projecting her needs onto their bodies. it got a lot of praise. I don't know why. it is viscerally repulsive to me. a white woman printing words of hate onto the bodies of her transracially adopted daughters. (i'm not linking to it here because i don't want to give it any more attention)

she says she wanted her daughters to know that people said these things out of ignorance, not meanness or hate. but isn't racism mean and hateful? words like "ignorance" delegitimize the pain of our experience. calling it ignorance tells me that I shouldn't feel bad when someone calks me "chink" or mocks my eyes or hair or shouts "5 dolla! me love you long time!" across the street. saying "oh, he didn't know better" teaches me that people who hurt me are really just good people so there must be something wrong with me. "ignorance" tells me I'm too sensitive. it teaches me to never trust my instincts. to keep unsafe people in my life because I have to give them a chance. it makes me wonder what i did to deserve people treating me so cruelly.

it draws a line in the sand, when white adoptive parents claim "ignorance" instead of racism, instead of hate. it draws a line between white and brown. when white adoptive parents claim "ignorance", they are taking the side of the racism. they are dismissing the pain of their children in order to avoid personal discomfort.

their needs, ahead of ours.

how do we protect ourselves when we are not free to name our enemies? how do we feel safe when the faces that taunt us tuck us in at night? 

I am constantly reminded, unpleasantly, of what my adoptive family is capable of, and what they are not. our relationship has improved as I have come to expect less of them. I think that is a good thing. realizing the limitations of family - of all kinds of family. of adoptive family, of family of origin, of chosen family, of friends, of community. no one of these spaces can be all things to me. and I would be cheating myself if i tried to push one kind of family to be all things. I am too complicated for that. I deserve better than that.

one thing I have come to love and appreciate at this time in my life is my queer adoptee family, and by extension my queerean family. but truly, the queer adoptees who have my back (and heart) right now are life saving. 

사랑해요. you give me strength.

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.

stories about hair (part 1 of 1000000)

summer 2001 - growing out my home bleach job

summer 2008. first time using buzzers.

(inspired by this post from the wonderful mightyfemme)

fat, queer, korean, adopted, nonbinary
there is a lot to say about hair.
here are bits and pieces. there are many more to come.

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beautiful, silky, shiny, lustrous, exotic...

i heard these words constantly from my mother, and every time i go to the salon. it's a place called Place Vendome, full of upscale perfume, magazines about dieting and older rich white ladies getting unstylish blowouts. i started going there after attempting to cut my own bangs at age 8. my mom went there for twenty years and admits she never got a good haircut from Lisa, her stylist.

this is not unexpected, considering that Lisa told me that i could never cut my hair above my shoulders because my face was too round. 

i was 11. just gotten my first period. growing out my bangs. i was vulnerable, impressionable.

these are things that stay with you.

---

a stranger once berated me for the size of my cheeks when i was young enough to use a stroller but old enough to remember every word.

---

my third grade i was 100 pounds. Tommy Gianis, scrawny, shrill-voiced elementary school bully, took every opportunity to call me a fat whale.

i took every opportunity to kick him in the testicles.

---

my hair was the only thing anyone ever said was beautiful about me.

even then, it wasn't that my hair was beautiful, it was that Asian hair was so beautiful.

---

for years i grew my hair out long. people would always ask me if i was going to do locks of love. in fifth grade i went in to cut it off but could only get about 18 inches. Lisa wouldn't cut it any shorter because of my fat face.

in middle school i began to want ultra-short hair because i thought that was how you were gay.

 but Lisa's words (and the advice of every teen/beauty magazine ever) kept me from it.

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but your hair is so beautiful. why would you want to do that?
i'd never do that if i had hair like yours.

my mom took me to Place Vendome to get red chunks put into my hair. they gave me teeny tiny auburn highlights instead.

i begged my mom to let me dye my whole head but she refused. i accused her of being concerned with how it would reflect on her with the other parents at my fancy Catholic private school. she screamed and denied it.

less than a year later, after dropping out of that school because of a bullying-induced mental breakdown (and switching to public school), my older brother bleached and dyed my whole head manic panic purple haze.

---

i didn't cut my hair above my shoulders until i was 18. at this time, i was emaciated, back down to my elementary school 100 pounds, because of a particularly toxic cocktail of psychiatric meds wreaking havoc on my system.

i was still so afraid of my round face. so round, in fact, that strangers still felt compelled to comment on it upon meeting me.

i was at an event offering free haircuts, but you had to wait your turn. i sat for an hour, flipping anxiously through short hairstyle magazines. i finally found a short, choppy hairstyle on an Asian model. i had always attributed my round face to being Asian (since every other difference people continuously commented on was related to by being Asian) and seeing that hair on an Asian face was comforting. i resolved to finally get the short hair i'd always wanted. but when it came to my turn i wimped out, just told her to give me a slight trim.

a person who had been sitting next to me stood up, pointing to the hairstyle magazine i had been looking through.

"no," they said. "they want this one."

---

it doesn't end there. it only begins again. it gets more complicated. but here is a beginning. here is a place to start.