thresholds and first-steps
My husband checked his phone to see the time. 11:18pm shone bright through his cracked screen. He sighed softly and turned off the tv, then rose from the couch and began turning off the lights in our living room, one-by-one. He leaned down and gave me a kiss, then said he was going to read in bed for a little while. I smiled and nodded at him. As he left and the room fell quiet, my eyes adjusted to the loss of light and there I sat...alone. I thought about only one thing: At this moment, there is a letter being delivered on the other side of the world, making its way to a home where a woman may or may not still live. A woman who looks like me.
They are sending a letter to my biological mother. And I'm not ready for this. God, I'm not ready for this.
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I like to do a lot of things that make me feel nervous. I try to live by the philosophy that life begins at the end of your comfort zone. I find that there is something special and sacred about pushing past thresholds. It's invigorating to do the thing you thought you couldn't do. This is why I packed my little black Yaris with everything I had and moved to Nashville in 2014. This is why I took a job when I had zero prior experience in the industry. Why I flew to Ireland for a week to explore the country completely by myself. Why I uprooted and moved to Louisiana betting only with the heart sewn on my sleeve. Why I climbed a 14,000-foot mountain in Colorado on my own. I like to say yes. But the hardest part in all of this has been taking that first step. It's been like that for every stage in the process and it's been exhausting.
2016 was the first time I became curious about my adoption, mostly because I felt a gaping, bellowing hole in my life. Divorce will do that to you. But I also wondered if it had always been present, even before the divorce without my conscious knowing. Maybe the divorce was simply brushing over the surface of the wound bringing my awareness to it, like when you notice you've acquired a paper cut and wonder how long you've had it or try to remember when you cut it in the first place. I worried that if I never understood my past, where I came from, how I came to be, that I'd never be able to successfully move forward and heal, or to even love wholeheartedly. I thought that if I could know and understand the first chapter in my own biography, I'd finally be free to write the rest of it. But until then, I'd just be playing pin the tail on the donkey, blindly molding my life around shadows and shapes of who I thought I might be. I felt excited to start this journey. I reached out to my immediate family and closest friends to let them know of my intentions. I received nothing but support and encouragement.
I decided to begin my journey researching and learning more about Korean adoptions. My mother, also an adoptee, went through the same process of tracking down her own biological mother which helped me in knowing that I had options and actual steps I could take to start my own search, but I also didn't feel ready to dive in with any real forward motion. I wanted to wade around for a while. As much as I felt a kindred spirit with my mom and her story, I knew that mine was very different. Mine consisted of different countries, governments, languages, customs, and culture. Approaching this from a research perspective seemed more like a school assignment and thus seemingly safe and sterile. I could learn from a distance. I could keep it separate from me and I from it. I began by trying to answer the following questions: What was the adoption process really like? Why did so many Korean adoptions occur? What was happening in Korea at the time? Were there a lot of other children like me?
Here's what I learned...
The war had left Korea in great poverty and so adoptions began. I learned that at its peak in 1985, there were 8,837 Korean children adopted and sent overseas. That's 24 children per day. I learned about the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, the same year I was born, and how Bryant Gumbel of NBC announced that Korea’s main export was its babies. It caused an uproar. Articles like “Babies for Export” published in The New York Times and “Babies for Sale: South Koreans Make Them, Americans Buy Them” published in The Progressive came out and produced intense shame and embarrassment for the South Korean government, so they paused their foreign adoptions. I read more articles that included words like export, profit, cost, price...and immediately felt sick to my stomach. It reminded me that I was in fact, sold and bought, that I had a price attached to me, and that someone made a monetary profit from my exchange. I learned that some Korean adoptees are deported from the U.S. as adults, after having lived the majority of their life here because of incomplete paperwork at the time of adoption. Would I be like that? Did I have a chance of being deported and sent to a country where I could not communicate? Separated from my family and living in a place where I knew not a single soul?
It was so emotionally overwhelming I had to stop. I didn't understand why it was so painful at the time, but even the small act of learning about Korean adoptions was agonizing. I fell into confusion because thinking about my adoption had never been painful before.
After some time had passed, I decided to push through and take my first step. I submitted a DNA test to Ancestry.com. My mother had done it during her quest to find her biological family years before so I was familiar with the process. I ordered my kit while in Nashville and sent it off to the lab. A few weeks later I received an email saying that my results were in. What if I found a family member? What if it showed zero results? I remember logging in and navigating to the DNA matches portion of the site feeling nervous and scared. What I ended up feeling most of all, though, was shock. Shock to see a long list of tiny photos and profiles of people I shared DNA with. Shock because I realized...they were all Asian.
It seems so silly to write that. To even acknowledge it as if it were unexpected information. Of course they would be Asian, why would I think anything different? But it was the first time in my life I realized that anyone I was biologically related to would be Korean. It solidified the fact that I was, indeed, Korean. It also solidified the fact that the family I grew up with was not Korean. It challenged my whole perception of family. And that rift felt like the catastrophic aftermath from a seismic earthquake, splitting my identity into two jagged pieces.
My DNA matches were nothing more than an estimated 5th-7th cousins, which felt pretty useless for tracing back my lineage. Instead, I studied the faces of the photos I saw, trying hard to see any resemblance between their features and my own. There was one woman who appeared to be in her forties who seemed to have a similar face. I wondered if my biological mother would look like her too, or if I would look like her when I got older. I scrolled through the long list of Asian faces, but it felt strange. Foreign. I shared DNA with these people, but I felt an internal resistance. I didn't want to share DNA with them because they weren't my family. They didn't look like my family. I felt defeated and I felt alone.
I logged out of Ancestry and didn't log back in for another four years.
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Every time I consider taking a "first step", I'm overwhelmed and paralyzed by the multitude of possible outcomes I could face. What if I can't find anything? What if my mother is dead? What if she doesn't want to know me? What if I find out she was raped? What if she's lovely? What if we share things in common? What if she wants to have a relationship with me? What if she doesn't know where my father is? What if he abused her? What if he never knew about me? What if he did and didn't care? Each outcome just as terrifying to me as the next.
The only thing I know for sure at this point, is that my mother is alive. The social worker I've been working with has confirmed that there is no death certificate on record. There is a letter headed to the last known address of my biological mother letting her know that someone is trying to contact her. The realm of possible outcomes is vast, but I am twisted inside obsessing over three: scenario one, she never receives the letter because she no longer lives there and thus my search reaches a dead end, in which case I will feel helpless and lost with absolutely no idea how to move forward. Scenario two, she receives my letter but decides that she does not wish to communicate and know me which will feel absolutely crushing and I will be left with hundreds of unanswered questions for the rest of my life. Or scenario three, she receives my letter and is open to communication with me. Buried amidst all the fear, the pain, and the nerves, I realize I feel something I haven't felt often since the first time since I began this search: hope. And hope can feel like the scariest thing of all.
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