Posted with permission from my friend Lydia Hollingsworth. She posted this in a private forum where only Korean adoptees are allowed, and it simultaneously broke my heart and inspired me (before I realized it was from someone I knew). Occasionally I wonder whether I have outgrown the private adoptee forums, as recycled subjects come up, and then a post like this comes along, that moves my soul and pushes it off-balance, shakes up my brain […]
This was posted on facebook, and the author allowed me to share it here. It is such a poignant distillation of some of the complex emotions about our families and mothers that many adoptees carry. “I reunited with my birth mother in 1997 but have not seen her since. This morning my Korean half brother messaged me and told me that she saw the kids’ pictures on FB. He also told me she had surgery […]
If Korean adoptees were a country, it would be around the 190th largest, with a population bigger than Samoa or Guam. In a very physical sense, we are each part of a KAD nation. And yet, one of the strongest characteristics of our individual histories is extreme isolation. We were aliens in the truest sense of the word – dropped from space into a foreign world. We do not grow up together. We are not […]
Korean Adoptees are aliens. Not in the “immigrant” sense, but actually in the sense of a being from another planet. — By the time you are a few months old, you know everyone in your family, especially your mama. Within a few years, you have a very clear understanding of your world and what is “normal”. Right in the middle of all that, you are snatched to another universe where nothing makes sense. The words […]
