An Asian Adoptee's Perspective on Asian American Heritage Month

"Yeah, but you're not really Korean. You're American, right?"

* * *

I am about a month away from my 45th birthday. And yet, it is only in the past decade that I have finally begun to explore my own identity and history as an Asian person.

As a transracial, transnational adoptee, i.e., an Asian person raised by a White family in predominantly White communities, I spent most of my life severed from Asian culture, people, and history.

Then, in 2009, after seven years of searching, I got a call that my Korean parents were alive and waiting to meet me. Suddenly, upon reuniting with my Korean family, my identity and origins were thrust before me. Everything I thought I knew was turned upside down, inside out, and ultimately, burned to the ground.

I have been rebuilding my life and identity ever since.

* * *

Several years into post-reunion, I remember having a conversation with a loved one, at which point he stated, "Yeah, but you're not really Korean. You're American, right?"

My identity was emerging and shifting as a result of reconnecting with my Korean origins. This loved one sensed the evolution unfolding and was trying to reassert to what and whom my allegiance should be.

And yet his question of allegiance contrasted the other side of what is ultimately the same dilemma--the assumption that I cannot possibly be American while simultaneously being demanded to prove just how American I am. 

Asian Americans are expected to be assimilated, English-speaking, God-fearing Americans, while we are simultaneously yet paradoxically perceived and treated as foreigners who must have arrived in America only two weeks ago.

Asian Americans are often pushed into a state of limbo, or a tug-of-war that requires us to never be too much of who we are, while simultaneously being expected to demonstrate allegiance to a nation that has never seen us as anything but "the perpetual foreigner." 

As Asian adoptees, these demands are forced upon us in the context of a false but dominant narrative that we were "saved" or "rescued." Hence, our identity is assumed to be subjugated to the expectations and perceptions of White Saviorism for the sake of White Comfort.

Furthermore, Asian American identities are often manipulated and politicized during times of economic unrest, brutal wars, and racial tension. We are witnessing once again the racism and xenophobia so familiar to Asian Americans during the current COVID pandemic. Asian communities are being scapegoated and targeted, just as they have been throughout American history. 

Asian Adoptees, while often invisible within this back and forth, are still impacted by the racism, discrimination, and xenophobia that result, as exemplified by the detainment and deportation of adoptees to over 30 countries.

Furthermore, Asian Adoptees in some ways experience an even greater expectation and demand to conform and assimilate within the White families that adopted us as a show of gratitude for being charitably "rescued" and brought to America. We remain eternally indebted to the White families that "took us in," and are therefore expected to pay that debt by exemplifying the "Model Minority Myth" (which is indeed a racist stereotype fabricated to serve white supremacy).

As Asian Adoptees, our Asian identities become a trophy for Whiteness to hold up only insofar as our Asianness serves the White Savior narrative. It must otherwise be erased when it does not serve that purpose.

Furthermore, as a Korean adoptee I must also mitigate the rejection by my own nation and people. Korea sent me away ultimately because I was not born in the "right way," i.e., I was born to an unwed mother. I had no proof of paternity and hence, I did not exist. So, they sent me away like I was dust.

Consequently, as an Asian adoptee, I feel a simultaneous yet paradoxical disconnection and connection from and to my Asianness and the collective history of Asian communities. 

I am connected to Asian communities through the profound impact that Empire, White Supremacy, Imperialism, and Colonialism have had on my existence. I am also connected to Asian communities through my experiences of racial violence and discrimination. But I am disconnected from the core of my Asian heritage as a result of being severed from my Korean family, culture, and origins.

Some days I feel at odds with my Asianness. Other days, I feel reluctance. On good days, I feel solidarity, yet from a distance. Rarely, do I feel fully at peace with my inherited Asianness. 

For me to be Asian American means I was involuntarily taken from my mother, my family, my origins. It means my identity and origins were erased.

More specifically, to celebrate my Asian heritage requires me to first acknowledge that my Asian heritage was taken from me. The reason I am an Asian in America is a result of the oppression and exploitation exacted through American colonialism and imperialism.

I spent the first three decades of my life cut off completely from my origins and identity. 

While, yes, I can celebrate the progress I have made and the reconnection with my Korean family, any celebration of my Asianness inevitably and inextricably also carries with it the profound trauma, loss, and grief that I bear as an Asian person who was forcibly separated from my origins. 

I lost everything. That kind of loss, at least for me, will never be reason to celebrate.

I am not lucky or fortunate to have lost everything. I am not blessed to have been severed from my own mother, paid for, and brought to a nation and people that would despise me as perpetually foreign.

Nor am I lucky that my own nation and people were willing to send me away, along with almost 200,000 more children for a small price that they could profit off of culturally-inflicted shame. 

In some ways, I feel neither Asian nor American. And in other ways I cannot escape that I am both Asian and American.

It’s a terrible no man’s land of purgatory, in which I must make my own way. 

Of course ultimately, I get to decide who I am, even if the world around me cannot see beyond their own eyes and minds.

Yet that is in large part what being Asian American means to me--constantly having to assert who I know myself to be while managing and mitigating the identity and expectations forced upon me by others who think they know who I am, but ultimately have not a clue.

 * * *

So while May is the month marked to celebrate my Asian heritage and the contributions made by the members of a vastly diverse community of Asian Americans, I feel both proud and conflicted, both pensive and grateful, both united and divided.

Yet one thing I can embrace is the powerful and resilient presence and history Asian communities can claim. This rich history often goes unseen and is regularly neglected and ignored. As I educate myself, I am learning just how vital the role of Asian communities has been in this country (and around the globe).

While I may struggle to find my place, I do not struggle to find inspiration from those who have gone before me, as well as those who are following after me.

It is of course always important to acknowledge the pain and suffering our communities have endured. It is also equally vital to remember all the stunning and powerful ways our communities have resisted and overcome here and throughout the history of the world.

Even as I continue to grapple with my own identity as an Asian American, I am able to grasp that I am also a valuable part of the big, beautiful tapestry that is Asian American heritage. While I may never feel fully resolved or fully connected, I cannot deny that my thread exists and brings its own color and meaning to the larger story of the collective.

And that, for now, is enough for me.

____________________

*I also want to acknowledge our Black and Brown brothers and sisters who have suffered profoundly under the same oppressive and brutal systems. We are not the same, but we have all suffered under the same systems that seek to undermine and exploit our self-determination and power for their own profit and benefit.

One Child at a Time*

With my foster family in South Korea

I recently published an essay titled, “Colonized through Adoption.” After I published the piece, I realized that I could have just as appropriately titled the piece, “Erased by Adoption.**”

But then, I thought to myself--or I could simply write an additional piece examining the ways in which I have experienced erasure through adoption.

I have been intensely reflecting upon my adoption and reunion recently, primarily because this January of 2019 marks a decade since I reunited with my Appa and Omma. Who I am and how I frame my adoption have dramatically evolved over the past decade. It would be diminutive to qualify any of these changes as good or bad. Rather, I can only recognize that they have been necessary.

One of the necessary paradigm shifts that has transpired over the past decade is recognizing the painful truth that I, along with so many of my cohorts, have been erased by adoption. Through adoption, we were required to participate in the erasure of not only our ethnic and cultural identities but our genetic and ancestral identities.

Once we arrived here in America, we disappeared. What do I mean by this statement?

An original performance piece I wrote and subsequently performed in the fall of 2018 attempts to elucidate this erasure through poetic prose:

War

was the beginning

of a New Death

for Two Hundred Thousand of Us

We vanished and

are vanishing

like a secret

that lies down with the dead,

as though we had never lived.

Being born in Korea of Korean people only to be taken from them to be given to White America and its people demanded that we forsake the identities bestowed upon us through DNA and history.

And yet, how does one erase DNA and history?

Adoption has taught me, one child at a time.

Taking a Korean child from her original family, people, community, and nation and placing her in a foreign family, people, community, and nation requires the erasure of the previous. It’s inevitable and necessary, both practically and for survival.

I forgot everything, because I had to do so in order to survive within a community that was ultimately hostile toward people that look like me. I was adopted in 1975--not too long after the American/Vietnam War which had followed previous violent conflicts between America and Asian nations, including World War 2 and the Korean War. Furthermore, I was adopted into a White American military family.

Halloween, 1982

Hence, I spent the majority of my childhood growing up on U.S. military bases both overseas and here in the States. The irony of being an Asian child adopted into a White American military family growing up in Asian countries and otherwise on U.S. military bases is not lost on me. As I addressed in "Colonized Through Adoption," my life was the exemplification of Whiteness as both Savior and Oppressor, Savior and Colonizer.

Imagine being the lone Asian face riding your bike, playing on the playground, walking to the bus, attending school--but on a U.S. military base? Imagine finding yourself in this context as a child, coupled with the “perpetual foreigner” stereotype.

Subconsciously, a child takes all that in and knows what needs to be done. You make yourself disappear. You make sure your Asianness vanishes, as though it never existed.

And at the time I was growing up, folks didn’t even know what Korea was. I was attending schools consisting primarily of Caucasian children who had not yet been alive long enough to know that the world was inhabited by other Asian countries beyond China, Japan, and Vietnam.

People often refer to the Korean War as the forgotten war. While I was growing up trying to explain to my friends from where I had come, it wasn’t only the war that had been forgotten. It was as though the country had been forgotten, and with it, as though the people from whom I had come never existed.

Because of my utter isolation from Korean and Asian communities due to my complete submersion within White communities, there were times that even in my child’s mind I began to wonder if perhaps Korea was a make-believe far-off land contrived to keep children like me in the dark, away from the families to whom we truly belonged, or maybe to protect us from a peril that would otherwise endanger our lives.

Or maybe, I was who the adoption papers said I was--a child abandoned by her mother and Korea, an insignificant place, so poor and so forgotten, that no one cared to inform their children of its people or their existence.

This is the inevitable and cruel erasure I speak of. The forced and choice-less vanishing that we adoptees must ultimately endure in order to steel ourselves from what is obvious to not only us but to everyone else around us--we do not belong.

So, we accept our Korean names being replaced with American ones. Our original languages being replaced with English. We accept that we have White parents and that we are being raised as White sons and daughters. We accept that we will most likely never know who we look like or why we are who we are. We accept that while we were born in Korea and we look Korean, we are expected to forsake those origins as though they never existed and replace them with White Eurocentric origins. We accept that when we are asked to create a family tree for a school assignment that not only we but our eventual children are expected to simply draft ourselves into a genealogy as though nailing a frond from a palm tree onto an apple tree is perfectly normal.

Adoption and erasure are inextricable from one another, just as war and killing are two sides of the same coin.

The moment I began to have the courage and strength to acknowledge this truth is the moment I began to redress that erasure. Of course, I cannot magically rematerialize all that was erased. But I can begin to examine what faint markings remain and either rewrite or write anew what I discover along the way.

The erasure by adoption need not be complete nor permanent. For while it is true that adoption erases DNA and history one child at a time, it is also true that DNA and history can be and will be reclaimed one adult at a time.

__________

*The month of January 2019 marks a decade since I reunited with my Korean family. I am publishing a series titled, "Reflections from the Other Side of 10 Years Post-Reunion" to honor and explore what I have learned over the past decade.

**You can read more regarding the topic of identity erasure, here and here.

Are You Anti-Adoption is Like Asking Are you Anti-Amputation?*

Recently I published an essay titled, “I Don’t Believe in Adoption Anymore,” as a part of my series “Reflections From the Other Side of 10 Years Post-Reunion." Inevitably, a reader always asks some variation of the question, "are you anti-adoption?"

This time, the specific question was “Is this post advocating against adoption?”

It’s a common question I have come to appreciate, because it always leads to deeper discussion and education. It also keeps me honest by compelling me to revisit the question and re-examine what I actually think--because our perspectives and views are not static. They often evolve over time as we gain new information and circumstances change.

When answering questions like these, I like to use metaphor to illustrate why these types of questions are inherently problematic and almost impossible to answer.

For instance, when you ask an adoptee are you “advocating against adoption,” it’s akin to asking me if I am “advocating against amputation?”

Ultimately, it’s the wrong question to ask.

The question we should be asking is “how do we prevent amputation?” What other less extreme and consequential solutions can we implement and develop? What can we do to keep the leg or arm in tact?

And certainly, I would never advocate for amputating someone’s leg or arm, especially against their will, for the sake of some other person over there saying they want another leg or arm. Can you imagine telling a person, “We need to amputate your leg to give it to that person over there who needs another leg.” That’s not even an option. Doesn’t even pop onto the radar of your mind, right?

Well, that’s how we should feel about severing a child from his or her mother and family. It should generally just not be an option. Rather, like amputation, it should be a last and desperate resort when all other options have been pursued and cultivated.

So, when you encounter adoptees or others advocating for family preservation or expressing that poverty and duress should never be reasons to severe a child and mother for the purposes of adoption, rather than ask with alarm, “is this person advocating against adoption?,” I hope you’ll ask the question, “how do we prevent this from happening?” How do we prevent severance of mother and child? What can we do to prevent adoption?

When we can move beyond the binary ideas of "for vs. against" adoption--and rather start asking and answering questions that get at the root of the issues, then we stop seeing adoption as a primary solution. We are able to see it as a symptom of deeper, more complex issues that need attention and care.

I am not advocating against adoption any more than I would advocate against amputation. Rather, I I would prefer to prevent adoption just as I would prefer to prevent amputation. I don’t think that’s too much to ask, particularly in a day and age when the resources and opportunities to do so are at our fingertips.

___________

*The month of January 2019 marks a decade since I reunited with my Korean family. I am publishing a series titled, "Reflections from the Other Side of 10 Years Post-Reunion" to honor and explore what I have learned over the past decade. For additional essays, click here.

Colonized Through Adoption: Whiteness as Savior and Oppressor*

*The month of January 2019 marks a decade since I reunited with my Korean family. I am publishing a series titled, "Reflections from the Other Side of 10 Years Post-Reunion" to honor and explore what I have learned over the past decade. In my first essay in the series, I stated that finding my Korean family was the "advent of my Emergence." In the following essay, I elucidate in greater detail what this "Emergence" means to me.

_____

Visiting the DMZ

To emerge from the darkness of the suffocating White Fog as a mind colonized through adoption is to realize that my existence was being used to uphold and perpetuate White Supremacy and White Saviorism, and hence to serve the systems and institutions used to continue to oppress fellow Black and Brown humans.**

I was a trophy to display and parade before the world upon which Whiteness could gaze to find affirmation of its superiority and goodness. To see an Asian person being properly kept in her place to serve the egos of Whiteness. They could look at me and know that they had conquered not only a person but an entire people and nation--that Whiteness had so effectively subjugated not only this child but also her people and country that they too came to believe that Whiteness was ultimately superior, ultimately more worthy of its people, its land, and its children.

This journey of awakening that began over a decade ago has been a painful and startling emancipation from the toxic gas of the White Fog that acts upon your mind like a poison that makes you forget all that you know, that you will remember only what they want you to know. The more you breathe it in, the more you live in it, the more you see the world through it, the more all truth becomes obscured until it completely dissolves beyond your perception that there is no other side or view or possibility other than the unequivocal goodness of Whiteness. And then, the more you lose yourself and become who they want you to be: a proselyte of and an evangelist for their Doctrine of the Infinite Goodness of Whiteness.

Emergence almost feels like a death only to be resurrected into a world more horrific and violent and oppressive than you ever imagined.

Emergence reveals more blood, more brutality, more pain, more terror, more atrocity and genocide and annihilation and destruction than one would ever want to know.

The realization that so much of the world you live in is the result of the violence, genocide, and oppression exacted by Whiteness against your fellow Black and Brown human beings is like the light of a wild, unyielding fire that destroys all that you thought you knew--and the closer you get to it, the more likely you are to be consumed by its flames, simultaneously willingly and against your will. You begin to long for the comfort of the burning roar that gives you the light and the warmth of which your mind has long been starved. And yet, the inevitable pain, wounds, and scars that must emerge with such revelation become all the more prominent and pervasive.

Emergence reveals that the White World is anything but white. Rather it is an insatiable darkness veiled as light. It is the continuous infliction of utter horror and pain upon Brown and Black people re-branded as saviorism and martyrdom to indulge and coddle the fragile White Ego.

I have an excruciatingly difficult time articulating how utterly, profoundly crushing the burden of this emergence is and how it grows. How its weight seems only to increase rather than lighten.

Through adoption, my life became--against my will and choice--the exemplification of Whiteness as both Savior and Oppressor.

My family is my Oppressor. And my Oppressor is my family.

How does one begin to unload decades of racism and colonization within the context of a family, church, and community that I had grown to love and that I thought had grown to love me, only to discover that underneath the surface was a depth of darkness, brutality, and oppression of the people and nation from which I came, along with every brown and black nation on earth. That this beloved community that I called mother, father, brother, sister, friend since infancy had also been complicit and continues to be complicit in the oppression, brutality, and injustice inflicted upon people who look like I do.

I try to tell myself that deep down, they love me. And yet, deep down, I also feel, see, recognize that they loved me, in large part, for how I could serve their Whiteness--not intentionally, but as an inextricable part of their implicit bias passed on to them through a system of white supremacy and privilege that is so ingrained within their life experience that it is almost genetic.

As long as I stayed in my designated role, as long as I played the part that confirmed their biases, as long as I didn’t try to be any part of myself that challenged their presumptions, that rejected their expectations, that acknowledged their privilege, that saw the dark underbelly of Whiteness, that spoke the whole truth of history, that embraced my own origins and history, then they loved me.

But once I began to emerge, the strained and tense threads of that love also became increasingly apparent.

The love that belonged to me from them was of the kind that a colonizer has for the colonized. The love they gave to me was that of a master over his servants. The love that a conqueror has for the conquered. Love given to those viewed as savages, as primitive, as less than they. A love born of pity, because they see the subject as inherently inferior. The love of narcissism--loving only that which loyally and persistently adulates, lauds, and praises the narcissist.

This is the kind of emergence that I have come to both dread yet seek.

This kind of awakening is what it feels like to simultaneously die inside while being born to oneself, over and over again. To realize that you lived the first half of your life subjugated and oppressed, serving every whim, every desire of the fragile ego of your oppressor. That you existed to perpetuate the falsehoods of White Saviorism and Martyrdom. To realize that the ones you called family, the ones you loved with all your heart for all of your life spent so much of that time seeing you not as one of them, but rather as a charitable endeavor to serve their egos and narrow, White-centric worldview where all Brown and Black people are inferior and in need of a White Savior.

And yet even as you emerge, that same oppression continues to pull at your heels, threatening to swallow you whole again.

Maintaining emergence requires daily vigilance. It requires never sleeping again. A relentless state of both exhaustion and alertness.

You have to learn not to fear yourself. 

Emergence requires undoing decades of being indoctrinated to fear who you were born to be. Because that is what my Oppressors taught me, trained me to believe--that who I am is to be feared.

I learned to suppress, denigrate, obscure, devalue any skill, talent, or passion I felt teeming within. And now, as I try to awaken it, as I try to fan it into flame, I feel terror and futility. Like an animal who refuses to exit its cage--terrified of freedom because it has only known captivity. Other times, I feel like an impostor and a fraud, or like a spoke in a wheel spinning hopelessly in the mud.

And yet somehow, I also find the strength, hope, perseverance, and love to finally shed the cold bars of the cage in which I have dwelled for most of my life. Somehow, I continue to choose to venture out, to cultivate the courage and resilience to wander great distances, until I hope one day to find myself to have traveled so far that I will never return.

The truth is that I do not know that I will ever truly break free of the bonds that have held me down for so long. I do not even know ultimately what that would mean or how that would look.

All I know is that I cannot help but try--to pull, push, fight, work feverishly and fervently to allow this emergence to unfurl that I may take on my true form with clarity and power, because I must believe that the world needs all of us to awaken and emerge from the minds that colonize us.

______

*This is the third essay in a series titled, "Reflections from the Other Side of 10 Years Post-Reunion," that I am publishing as I examine the past 10 years since reuniting with my Korean family. To view additional essays in this series, click here.

**The above words are actually quite frightening for me to publish and put out into the public space, because I know how extreme and radical they will be perceived to be by some. The above essay is to be read within not only the broader historical and sociopolitical context of systematic and institutionalized racism, white supremacy, and oppression upon which this country is built, but also with an understanding of the role that implicit bias and white privilege play. More specifically, it is not that I believe that White parents do not love their adopted children of color. But I do believe that without conscious efforts to educate themselves, White adoptive parents struggle to escape the fog of implicit bias and privilege that clouds their vision and ability to acknowledge and affirm the racial and historical realities of their adopted children of color and the communities from which they originated. And hence, whether directly or indirectly, they become complicit in the oppression and marginalization of their adopted children of color and their communities. And for those readers who will inevitably assume that "She must have had a bad upbringing" or "She must not love her adoptive parents," please read this post, "Yes, I love my parents," at my retired adoption blog, "Yoon's Blur."