You may never understand why

It's 6 AM and New Year's Eve and if you asked me to tell you how I was feeling right now - I know I wouldn't be able to. I never thought that I would ever be surrounded with so much love in my life and still feel so uncertain about everything to the point where it was harder to sleep at night.

I keep wondering if it's worth me getting upset over this. Wasn't it a loss in the first place? What if you woke up and the thing you thought you had always lost... might not be lost after all? Does that mean that even if you go through all the effort of searching for it - that if it goes lost again...everything is back where it was? And I remain the same?

Somehow, no matter how many times I might try to tell myself that you can't feel loss over something already lost...that I inevitably will. Because initially, isn't it always 'hope' that we feel anyway? 'Hope' that we could find that missing piece to our puzzle...and then when the hope disappears, it isn't necessarily the actual piece that we're missing. I think I'd start to miss the feeling of hope that it was ever there in the first place.

I am a step away from possibly knowing everything...or maybe even having more questions than I know what to do with. How do you differentiate between the questions of a 6-year old and the logical questions of a 23-year old? You can't, I guess. There is probably little difference of importance in my mind between: "Whose nose do I have?" and "Were you economically in hardship when you made that decision 23 years ago?"

Who knows what is going to happen on Friday. I am not even sure if I have an idealistic pan out of how I would want it to go because it hasn't crossed my mind.

But one thing is for sure...please don't ask me how...I have missed you.

A Day To Remember (or perhaps to forget)

There are four pages of a scribbled letter tucked inside my black and white marbled notebook. It was the beginnings of a future blog post for this blog - my annual letter to my birthmother - telling her the struggles and triumphs of my 23rd year of being alive.

For the past week and a half, I, for some reason, kept holding off actually sitting down and typing it out here, not because it was too personal or too gritty...honestly, if you had asked me why I wouldn't have been able to give you a straight answer. Maybe it was because I have been so consumed with the move from Dundalk. (Yes, I have finally LEFT Dumb-dalk for good...and will post pictures of the barren room once I find my camera in one of these boxes that are looming in my room.) Whatever the reason, it just never got done.

And maybe it was a sign that I was meant to read it to her in person...

I don't really know where to begin with the rest of this post. I was trying to think of some clever epithet that might transition into the whole point of the post - but at this point, my brain is too fried with an excess abundance of emotion and utter cluster-fuckery (I just made that word up.) to even be witty or even give a hoot whether I am witty or not.

December 23, 2008 @ around 1 AM will be forever seared in my brain. If and when I have children, and I reflect on this tale to fill bedtime story nights, I will probably still struggle to piece together just exactly what got seared into my brain: a cautionary tale or a Christmas miracle. It is too early yet to decide.

But whatever it will be - what it is right now, at the present, is the exact time that I was trying to get rid of a nasty migraine by sleeping it away... and my 2nd night sleeping on the mattress that is in what will eventually be my bedroom in my Aunt's house. It seems ordinary and simple enough, and started out as any other night ...except that 1 AM will also forever be seared into my brain as the time my mother came into my bedroom to wake me up with the news.

The news that my birthparents have been searching for me and want to meet me.

It is now 11:02 pm of the very same day and I think I must have written the above sentence or said variations of it to myself at least a hundred thousand times. And yet even with saying it a hundred thousand more, I do not think that the sentence's true meaning will ever fully sink itself into my brain and channel signals of acknowledgement to my being.

Even now, there is still detachment from that sentence - as if tomorrow that whole sequence: me sleeping, my mom rushing into my bedroom in her jacket, shaking me awake, her eyes lighting up, and me sleepily opening my eyes to watch her lips move to form the words of that very same sentence....that whole sequence will be nothing but a dream. An afterthought to another dream that I had had.

But a part of me knows that it wasn't. That it was real. But I am not ready to believe that part. All day long I have been trying to figure out how to sum up how I feel and I just can't...it is hard to explain how in one moment - everything has changed with nothing happening. How just words could change my entire world and turn it upside down with no action following.

I am, Blog, scared shitless. Today I have felt happy, annoyed, joyous, angry, resentful, sadness, fear and frustration in succession of each other and even at times, simultaneously.

I have so much to say and yet have no words to say it with.

I have so many questions and yet am not quite sure I want to know the answers.

I want...and yet wish it was easier just to walk away...at the exact same time.

And despite all these crazy feelings - the one thing I keep dwelling on is the revelation that they searched for me.

Undecided

I met up with a friend last night that I hadn't seen in a while. I had promised her a long time ago that I would have dinner with her, and see her new apartment but I just had never gotten around to it (partly due to the transportation issues).

So at around 6:40pm I headed out to meet her and a few of her friends at XS on N. Charles Street for dinner.

It was fun finally being able to get to where I wanted to go, and be able to leave the house when I wanted - except when it came time to find a parking spot. I ended up paying $10.00 (yes, 10 whole dollars) to park in a garage over on Cathedral Street and walk the two blocks up Preston to where it met Charles. I conjured up the reasoning that I needed the exercise anyways.

I walked into the familiar sights and sounds of XS. The bustle of the girls and guys dressed in black from head to toe, scrambling down the three flights of long stairs to get to the kitchen in time for the food not to be cold for the patrons. (That part always amazed me.)

I found a seat on the second floor and waited for the others to arrive.

Once they did, I found out that my friend's best friend/roommate was celebrating her early birthday. We ordered, and had pleasant conversation and then decided that we would go back to my friend's apartment where she had baked a cake for the occasion in an attempt to emulate "Ace of Cakes". It was actually an awesome attempt and I am going to have to steal some photos from her later on.

As we dove into the four tiered cake and gathered around her dining room table, the conversation suddenly took a turn towards attending to finding birthparents.

I don't know how we got on it - I think it started out as an arbitrary topic and ended up with the birthday girl telling a story about how she never wanted to ever find her birthfather - that she knew who he was, but that he never gave a damn about her so why should she try to find him? She ended with, "Nothing ever comes good of that - I am totally against the whole search thing, nothing ever comes good so it's not even worth bothering to try."

And it got me thinking - am I, too, against the whole search thing? Is that the subconscious thought in my head that has really stopped me from taking all of the many chances that I have had to go back to Korea and find my birthparents?

I just got another offer last week from a program that helps adoptees take their first journey back home. I could easily take that trip and then head over to the G.O.A'L. office and ask Dae-won to help me find them. Put in the search application.

And even though I kept the email in my inbox, I know that I probably won't take the offer. In fact, I know for a fact that I won't take the offer. And it's starting to bug me as to what my real reasoning behind it is. I keep telling myself that I would never be able to get the time off from work to go on that two week trip like that. I tell myself that I wouldn't want to go alone if I did take that trip - so if I had to go alone, I would skip out.

But jobs come a dime a dozen (if you're not too picky), and I only have one pair of birthparents. Two people that aren't going to be immortal forever and ever. So why am I not rushing?

The answer? I don't know. I think that it is something there that digs a lot deeper into the surface that I am not yet ready to uncover just yet. I thought I had this all figured out - and that I would go back and find them - and we'd live partially a f&cked-up life of twists and turns between my adoptive parents and my birthparents. And I was okay with that. But in recent times, I have found that my answer to that age old question of: "Have you ever thought about looking for your birthparents?" has gone from a "oh yeah, totally. I really want to." to a "Uhhh, I'm not sure, I am kinda taking it easy right now."

It's like asking a person whether they've decided to take the Low Carbs diet or not. And it's killing me that I am still so undecided.

Beauty in the Eye of the Surgeon

"A plastic surgeon has published a composite image of the ideal male Korean face. Rhee Seung-chul, the head of plastic surgery at Hanil General Hospital, made the image from the faces of 16 Korean Wave stars. Rhee had earlier done the same thing for women by making a composite image of 19 female stars."

Apparently, this computer-generated man to my left here is Korean male perfection in a nutshell. Personally, I think he looks a bit too effeminate but then so do most Korean male movie stars, IMHO.

I remember when I first saw "My Sassy Girl" when I was 10 or 11 years old; it was my first time watching Korean cinema. ---->

It was during my "Quest for Identity" stage where I was obsessed with buying Asian babydolls, Asian clothes, and random Korean commodities like some crazy American tourist. (which I guess, essentially, I am) So it was only fitting that I would be wanting of some sort of solid cultural evidence of the Korea that I had grown to love through picture books, tourists' pamphlets, and those bags of Shrimp Chips (I can't get enough of those things!) with the little dancing pink shrimp illustrated on the front that I would buy in bulk at Lotte.

So what kind of awesome cultural experience would I have while watching a movie that I envisioned thousands and thousands of my fellow Korean peers rushing to the movie theaters to see? The credits began to roll, and the title flashed across the screen.

Then a close-up of a pale Asian face comes into the camera view, and they zoom out. I notice how flat her face looks, how high her cheekbones are, how pale her face looks, how wide her eyes appear, and how thin her lips seem. Is this the image of utter beauty in Korea?

Another scene, I am patient. Here comes the dude. His face is fuller, but still flat, he has thin lips as well but his skin color seems to have a bit more pigment. His eyes are just as big as hers...but the way he presents himself is sort of feminine, and submissive. Is this the image of the perfect male in Korea?

I know that America isn't perfect. We have our own visions of beauty, and what is desirable and what isn't. We have coke-addicted models who starve themselves and live half their lives in toilet rooms, and we have rockstars who tattoo their bodies from head to toe and then go shoot some crack in the back corner to stay "heavy rock thin". But for some reason, these two characters that were presented to me in "My Sassy Girl" made it seem like they were more like cartoons than they were people.

But alas, at 10, I was young, foolish, and impressionable. I suddenly saw this picture of a seemingly "gorgeous, perfect" Korean woman and wanted nothing more than to be her. I started going to the Korean beauty parlor down the street, wanting long black hair, extra straight. I wanted to have pale skin like all of my other friends did (but was too chicken-sh-t to buy the bleaching lotion at the Lotte beauty counter) and would hide for hours from the summer sun because I tanned too easily. I wanted wider eyes (and alas, I have to admit, I still to this day kind of wish that I still did have sangkapul...) so I would allow my Joann-unni to tape my eyelids with cosmetic tape to create the 'illusion' that I had a second fold before church service started.

I look back at those days and think of how silly I was. And how comfortable I am finally in the skin that I am in now. It took me forever... and I think I am still learning to accept things - because there will always be obstacles in life where you're faced to question what you believe in yourself, and how you view yourself. Especially for the first half of this year, for me.

I hope that this next younger Korean generation will not be so easily swayed by this ridiculousness. Computer-generated people are not REAL people. They are mounds and mounds of Botox injections. They are threads and threads of mini stitches in their faces, their chins, their necks, their stomachs. They are artificial in every sense of the word.

And eventually, the more plastic you become on the outside - the more plastic you're bound to become on the inside.

Perhaps...a trip back to the Homeland?

Thanks to Amanda (the Imported Megami) for the heads-up on this link:

Journey 2007

Does the Arirang have a possible outlet to go visit the Homeland?

Hmm, this could be quite interesting...

Congratulations, Toby Dawson!

2007-03-01
Breaking News: Toby Dawson Finds his Father

Seoul, South Korea (Ski Press)-In the coolest story of the day department, the Associated Press reports that former US freestyle skier and 2006 Olympic bronze medalist Toby Dawson has found his father.Dawson, who retired from professional skiing last spring, was famously asked more questions about his adoption than about his medal after winning Olympic bronze. That news played heavily in South Korea, where Dawson was lost in a South Korean market more than 20 years ago. Later adopted in the US, Dawson has sorted through dozens of false claims of parenthood. It is only now, according to the AP, that through genetic testing and background research into the claims, that Dawson was able to finally meet his family.According to the AP, Dawson and his father, Kim Jae Su, embraced, "and Dawson said a Korean phrase he had learned for the meeting - "I've been waiting a long time, father.""

For more: http://www.sptimes.com/2007/03/01/Worldandnation/Olympic_success_helps.shtml

St. Petersburg Times Article:

Olympic success helps skier find dad

By ASSOCIATED PRESSPublished March 1, 2007

SEOUL, South Korea - Far from the mountain where he skied to Olympic fame, Toby Dawson found his family.

More than two decades after he was lost in a South Korean market and eventually adopted in the United States, Dawson was reunited with his father Wednesday.

They embraced, and Dawson said a Korean phrase he had learned for the meeting - "I've been waiting a long time, father."

Hugging his son at a hotel, Kim Jae Su teared up.

"I am glad to meet my son and see that he has grown up so wonderfully," Kim said. "I am thankful that he has come to look for me even after such a long time."

The reunion, which included a brother, was made possible by the bronze freestyle skiing medal Dawson won at the Turin Olympics last year. The victory earned him wide attention in the country of his birth.

After the Olympics, dozens of would-be parents came forward to claim Dawson was their child, including Kim. But after years of dashed hopes, the 28-year-old Dawson put off an earlier planned trip to Korea and waited for confirmation from genetic tests before traveling here this week.

Dawson was 3 when he was lost in a market by his mother in the southern port city of Busan, Kim said. A truck driver at the time, Kim said it was too late when he got home to start searching for his missing child, whose original Korean name was Bong-seok. Over the next few days, he said he scoured local orphanages but was unable to find his son.

"I went to many orphanage houses only to hear that they didn't have anyone like him. They wouldn't let me come inside and look for him," the 53-year-old Kim said, adding he searched orphanages whenever he had time but eventually gave up.

"I'm not here to beat him up for what happened," Dawson said, adding that he had a fortunate life growing up with his adoptive parents, who were ski instructors in Vail, Colo.

Dawson said he plans to use a new foundation he is starting to help avoid cases like his in the future.

"Being caught in limbo between two different countries and not looking like your family is going to be tough," he said. "We need to try to keep our children and work a little bit harder to keep these circumstances from happening."

Dawson noted how he shared his healthy sideburns with his father, who during the news conference reached over several times to touch Dawson's face while they also held hands.
Kim declined to talk publicly about Dawson's biological mother.

[Last modified March 1, 2007, 01:11:48]



There were so many articles written about Toby Dawson reuniting with his biological father this week. And I pretty much have read every single one of them.

There was this huge emotional mix-up while reading all the articles, and hearing what each news article had to say.

One: I was happy for Toby. It's this closure to the biggest chapter in an adoptee's life and he had found the ending of that chapter, and the beginning to a whole new one.

Two: I was sympathetic immediately, and was overjoyed when Toby was quoted as saying that growing up he found it very difficult, like "living in two very different worlds". So many adoption agencies and adoptive parent groups keep saying that the child will get over it, the child will adapt and assimilate. But it's not that easy. It's never going to be. To have someone in the media spotlight state that outright is amazing to me, especially with all this Angelina-Brad Pitt-Madonna crap going on.

Three (and this is the one that is the hardest for me to admit): Jealousy. Just sitting here reading the story, and how Toby hugged his father and spoke to him in Korean - wow, well I don't know what else to say besides the fact that I wish it was me. It's hard for anyone who isn't an adoptee to fully understand - especially my parents - but I just felt this tinge of pain in my heart because there is this huge loss there that I will never be able to fill. I won't even say "until I meet my birthparents" because who knows? What if it isn't as successful as Toby's journey? Not everyone's is. But just the thought that at least he knows something is enough for me to feel jealous - that I don't have anything. As far as I know, my whole life history could be fictitious.

I feel bad that I felt jealous and still do a little. I am not sure how to explain how my feelings about my birth search has changed over the years from when I was a little girl, staring into the mirror and touching the features of my face: my eyes, my mouth, the shape of my jawline and wondering which one was my mother's and was that my father's nose? to being an adult, and not worrying so much about it anymore - and yet being completely and utterly aware of the void that comes with not knowing.

I am still scared of the search process. Not that it is difficult or tedious or anything like that. Moreso for my personal reasons, the emotional journey that it would entail from me. I realize that the journey would strip me completely if I let it, and I am not certain that I am emotionally strong enough for that yet. I do know that it is something I want to pursue, and when the time comes, it'll happen. But for now, I can be happy that a fellow KAD found his truths to end one chapter and begin another.

When the memories come...

I was 3 months old when I came off the plane in BWI Airport from Korea into the arms of my mother and father. For so long, I was told to be happy that I didn't own any devastating infancy memories of abandonment or abuse. But the fact of the matter is, I don't own any memories at all. Well, that's not completely true.

They say that a newborn's first years are the most understated and underrated years of life. There are parenting books that say just because they are newborns or babies doesn't mean that what you do as a parent or caretaker won't mean anything and it doesn't mean that babies won't have memories, too. I wasn't sure how much of this I believed until my memories started rushing in. And in the strangest and most memorable times.

It wasn't until my sophomore year of high school that I got my first "memory" of the Homeland and of my birthparents. I was really sick and to this day, it was never really diagnosed fully what I had experienced (although after going to six different medical specialists I had six different diagnoses: IBD, some rare form of IBD, small intestine inflammation, etc.). Regardless, I was in the worst pain that I had ever been in in my life. By the middle of 10th grade, I had to be removed from school and placed in a hospital. At my time of arrival, I weighed in at 75 lbs. because my body couldn't hold any of the food that I put in it and I was constantly nauseated by my own stomach acid. They placed me on IVs and then stuck me in a hospital bed. During my stay, my close Korean friend came to visit me, and sat down at my bedside. I remember just being completely out of it as he tried to talk to me. But then, all of a sudden, I felt his hand touch my cheek, and I heard the soft sound of his voice as he began to sing "San Toki".

But even though the small conscious part of me recognized that it was him who was singing, for some reason, I heard a woman's instead. A softer voice, and then the touch of a cooler, softer hand, and I closed my eyes and just clung to this feeling. It was this warm feeling that rushed over me, as if the warmth were someone trying to guide me into memory, as if to say "You've been here before. You know it this place."

A week later, I was completely healthy and returned home. I told my friend all about it, and was so excited and yet overwhelmed by how much this one instance had stuck with me, and had left me with this bittersweet happiness.

He said, "Eun-jung ee, don't you know? That was your hangukae uhma singing to you. You can remember now."

From then on, memories of her seep through me. And I think about her and him on a regular basis. What do they look like? Are they proud of me? Do they know I am not angry at them? Do they know that I am not sad at how things turned out? Do they know that I want to be a part of their lives? Do they want to be a part of mine?

The Taste of My Chocolate is...

Kimchi and Korean garlic.

I swear, the taste of kimchi in my mouth is the sweetest taste ever, and I could spend hours just sitting at the table, wrapping up pieces of it in lettuce with a big sticky clump of rice and rolling into my mouth. Yummmm....

Korean garlic for me is one of the best things ever created. I don't know what makes it different, or whether it's where it's grown in Korea - but for some reason, the taste of it has this sweetness to it that is just like sugar. For me, that is my aphrodisiac. Most people think I am crazy, but I didn't always love Korean food the way that I do now.

It was something I grew into - just like I grew into my skin, and I remember when I was nine years old I used to get my haircut at the local place down the street from my parents' house. K Hair Studio (took my mom forever to figure out that the K stood for Korean) was owned by Ms. Sunny. She was one of the most influential people in my life...harboring in that little shop all the Korean that one little girl could expose herself to.

Everytime I came in to get my haircut in the early mornings on the weekends, there'd be no one in the chairs, no one by the hair sinks...but you could smell this strong smell of garlic and kimchi coming from the back of the salon.

In the back was this two-by-two kitchen where Ms. Sunny and Ms. Su and their friends would sit and cook Korean food. This is how I learned how to eat kimchi. They would call me into their tiny kitchen and pull up a small chair to the card table they had set up in the middle. On the tabletop there was this array of fresh cut lettuce leaves and a huge bowl of kimchi and rice in the middle with plastic spoons that were wrapped in plastic wrap.

"Clump the kimchi and rice together, Eunjung-ee...yes, like that"

"Ahjuma likes her kimchi hot, look, put some extra pepper paste on yours. You'll learn to like it soon. This is what your ancestors ate..."

So now whenever I get monthly "cravings"...while everyone is out rummaging from chocolate bags, and chocolate mousse and chocolate cake... all I want is that sweet, crisp taste of kimchi and Korean garlic, to bring me back to the homeland.