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How not to speak Korean

An-yoh has-him-ni-kah?
I don’t think so.

Searching within

(I started to reply to the comments on my previous post, but as my replies can tend toward the long-winded, I decided to just post anew, rather than be a self-comment hog. Oink oink.)

Well, I will say, it’s nothing if not a tangled web. A while back, another TRA friend of mine searched and located her bio family. When she heard the news, I was so excited for her, recalling how crazed I felt at that point. Yet I knew that it’s not as simple as a Hallmark card and a cigar. Buckle your seatbelt, and hold on, I told her.

There’s a brief, fleeting kind of moment that happened when I searched. I think I felt it right as I dropped the letter in the mailbox, the one that included my signed, notarized search request form. And then I felt it again right before I walked through the door that day I met my Korean parents. And it happens each time I send off a particularly emotional letter to my unni or my umma. And whenever I start to despair, having gone months without return contact from them. I think of it as the “Oh, shit!” moment. As in, “Oh, shit! What have I gotten myself into?”

But then the follow-up to that moment is the realization, the remembering, that I would jump in all over again if I had the choice.

For me, searching brought about a certain kind of peace of mind, knowing who my family is and where they come from, and where I come from, at least genetically. I never have to wonder about that piece of my life again — one big question mark I can X out of my life. And I realize with that tucked under my belt, I am already one of the privileged among the adoptees who will search, are searching, or have searched, but receive no match.

Of course, for every question answered (or at least answered in part), 10 new questions spring up in its place. And in finding answers, there’s also the necessity to accept that the truth is always changing. Is the answer I’m getting what really happened? Is it what my Korean family thinks is best for me to hear? Is it what they think I want to hear? What they’ve talked themselves into believing happened, but didn’t really? Sometimes what I learn on one day changes on the next.

Does searching take anything away? Perhaps, like several other fellow adoptees I know and friends who have discovered their bio families too late, having already lost a parent or both to time. Or what if you find them, only to learn that they don’t want to meet you? In searching, you might find that your birth culture — the one you should have belonged in — is as foreign to you as an imaginary world, and your sense of belonging there is as fractured as a broken mirror. I can see myself reflected in Korea, but the image is cracked and shattered by the years I have lived, removed from my birth country, never fully belonging in another.

Having searched, I live with a simultaneous feeling of closeness with my Korean family, as well as uncrossable distance. But I’ve no regrets, no wish to rewind back to reverse the years. I’m glad that I had the courage (or loose screw) to search, thankful that I beat the odds and that I found them and met and looked squarely at my abeoji before he died.

Some nights I sleep more soundly, knowing their faces, knowing that they are there, that they exist and exist with a knowledge of me running through their blood. And then some nights I toss and turn, pressed beneath the weight of not truly knowing them, not truly being known by them, and hollowed out by the emptiness of wondering if we ever will, truly, know one another.

Will I ever be able to reconcile those lost years to my satisfaction? The questions and the uncertainty cycle over and over. Some days I ride along on a glassy surface, willing myself to be at peace. And some days the grief just settles into the crevices of my heart, and I live with the labyrinthine legacy of feeling both wanted and unwanted by a family, a country and a decades-old system that is broken and in dire need of repair.

Searching was a way for me to reach back into my history and simultaneously stretch toward the future and reclaim something that I never really knew I had lost until I found — at least in part — what I had set out to look for. Even so, a part of me will forever be searching.

Pinging Korea

ping n.
1. A protocol that sends a message to another computer and waits for acknowledgment, often used to check if another computer on a network is reachable.

My connection to my family in Korea often seems as tenuous as a gossamer thread. Sometimes I think if there was a program that could ping lost family members, human beings on the other side of the ocean, I would be among the first in line for the beta test. The problem is, if you never receive acknowledgment that your ping request was received, then what do you do? Where is my network support representative?

That old insecure feeling is back. The whisperings of abandonment that can creep into the souls of adoptees and echo in the corners of our minds throughout our lives … I hear them hissing. Even having found my Korean family, a great part of them remains forever lost to me. Irrecoverable.

When weeks stretch out into months without word from them, I regress. I change into a smaller, less complete version of myself. Disheartened. Disoriented. Rootless. When months stretch out into seasons, I become a cultural vagrant, drifting over unnamed oceans, where nobody belongs.

When you search for your lost history, no one tells you that even if you find what you’re looking for, there will still be many restless days and nights when what you’ve found feels less like belonging, and more like not even existing at all.