I'm still dealing with the brain sludge from the emotional weekend...
- Thursday, 11/10: Travel from 인제 대학교(Inje) to Seoul
- Friday, 11/11: Confession Coffee with 어머니(mother)
- Saturday, 11/12: 4-hour Lunch with 언니(sister)
- Sunday, 11/13: Sleepover with 아버지(father) and meeting 동생(younger siblings)
- Monday, 11/14: Father Daughter time continued...
- Tuesday, 11/15: Non-threatening physical essentials: eat, wash, sleep
- Wednesday, 11/16: Surreal return to 인제 대학교(Inje)
Not to mention...going out last night for birthday beverages with 친구'z (friend+Z) [Ching GuZ]. I do believe that celebrating an adoptee's birthday is a powerful act of resistance against the capitalist machine that made our births invisible--as if we started when we fell out of the baby plane into the arms of middle-class white folks who signed the papers. So for this reason, I will tell myself that another night of beer and fast food is totally part of the life vision to take down systems of oppression.
This morning I find myself dwelling on my first parents, particularly their strengths and flaws in context of self-destruction. My mother is a street smart hustler who knows how to survive the world that is set up to take her out. She played the system that was playing her, and I was too small to protest her American dream meets revenge plot against my father.
I see myself in my mother's will gone bad when I revisit my early twenties at the University of Wisconsin. (I've described my experience there as getting my head repeatedly slammed against a brick wall, watching my blood trickle down in front of my eyes, and wondering if it was my fault for having a face that cracked so easily.) The worst was when I was working three jobs, one of which was serving at the best sports bar in town. On my lucky nights when I worked multiple shifts, I sold slippery nipples, redheaded sluts, dirty girl scouts, and blow jobs for a dollar. After being told "We like you as a person [but there's no place for you here]", I was laid off.
I felt dirty, used, and cheap...but I knew working there was the fastest way for me to earn money, graduate from college, and regain my agency from a racist, homophobic family that purchased me years ago. So then things got ugly....I started picking up the nice, virginal men who would adore me, and then I would manipulate into thinking it was their fault that I was breaking up with them. (Awful. I know.) I was trying to feel powerful within the larger context where I felt so powerless. I needed to escape the violence of my home by going to school. I could borrow money from my racist parents, but that would bind me to them when I had already waited eighteen years to break free. Instead, I chose to work while being a full-time student in order to keep up with the bills. My jobs at the Goodwill Donation Center and Cost Cutters Salon did not pay anywhere close to a four-hour shift on game day, getting tipped by a mob of old white men trying to relive their college days.
I felt desperate. I was at loss for how to change the world around me, while being trapped by my economic circumstances.
Here I can contextualize my mother's decision to leave me at Holt, though I still feel shaken by the destructiveness and near permanence of her action. I am a woman of color who grew up feeling invisible and powerless. I know the temptation to play the system that's playing me, and the ugly ways that feeling powerful when being powerless can manifest against those you love.
I have a feeling my father is no worse than an ambitious fool who is too privileged to recognize his participation within a system of patriarchy that separated us. He loses his temper. He makes mistakes. As I am making space for him in my life, I am feeling pulled to reconsider my white family.
It's unbelievable how much has changed since I moved to Korea on August, 28, 2011. Now I know that I was born at 8 am in Seoul, that I've always had an older sister who needed me, and that my birth family prayed for me and missed me my entire life. I know that I was clever and needy from the beginning, before abandonment and adoption. I know that my fierce independence and pride, destructive and indomitable at worse, is from my mother. I know that my passionate feelings and ambitions are from my father. I know I started before the baby plane, that I am a product of my parents and not only pathological because of abandonment and adoption. Now I know that there is an entire history and cultural context for my being.
제이름은 승미입니다. 저는 미국에서 왔습니다. 이번에 친부모님을 찾았습니다.
(My name is Seung Mi. I am from the United States. I found my birth parents.)
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