Lonely Seoul - Reuniting

Imagine you have the chance to talk to someone that you haven't seen in a really long time. Maybe that person has passed away, or maybe they live rather far away. Perhaps they live nearby, but you're both just so busy that you don't get to see that person very often. If you had that chance, would you drop everything and go see them? Go talk to them? Maybe you'd spend the whole time talking and talking, whether the topics are significant or not: it would just be nice to talk to them.

What if I told you that I have that opportunity? To meet someone who was once dead to me and is now alive? Someone I spent my entire life not thinking about. Someone I still don't even know how to imagine in my head because I have no physical image to remember this person by. If you know my story, you've probably guessed by now, who I'm talking about. I'm talking about my mother. Not the mother who raised me (love you, Mom), but rather, the mother who gave birth to me: the one who gave me life.

As a kid, I rarely thought about my origins. The closest I got was listening to Korean pop music (otherwise known as K-pop) in my early teens, which I couldn't even understand. It was catchy music in a language I didn't know. It was a language that I was born into but not raised in. As most Korean adoptees were. 

For those of you who don't know the details, I was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1996. I was given to a social worker the day of my birth, and I was adopted by my American parents in 1997. I'm definitely not alone in this. From 1999-2015 alone there have been 20,058 Korean children adopted by American families with 16,474 of those kids being under the age of 1 at the time of their adoption. (Source)

In April of 2015, I called the Ohio adoption agency (the local agency) and talked to an employee there about starting the birth search process to find my birth parents. I was on the fence about starting a birth parent search, but I wanted to have the paperwork in case I decided to do it. I got the paperwork and ended up filling it out a few weeks later, but I didn't send them to the agency until August of that year after I came back home from spending a summer in Nashville, TN.

It was actually my time in Nashville that finally gave me the push to officially start the birth search process. In Nashville, I met Koreans that weren't adopted. I met Korean people my age who spoke Korean. It was my first time being exposed to the Korean language, which I really didn't know anything about. I could kind of read it, but I couldn't speak it at all. It was there that I truly first felt like I was Korean, though I also sometimes felt alone and excluded at times because of the language barrier, but I had decided that my Korean heritage was something I wanted to explore more into.

Also in April of 2015, I decided I wanted to go to Seoul to study abroad for a semester. I spent the next 10 months planning, earning and raising money, and finally, on Friday, February 26, 2016, I jetted off for a 6-month adventure. It was my first time stepping foot in my birth country since I had left it in 1997. 

Being in Seoul was a unique experience. There were many times where I totally forgot the fact that I was immersing myself into the country and culture of my ancestors – of my birth parents. It often felt like any other trip abroad I’d been on: London, Ireland, India. I was disconnected emotionally through a lot of my time in Seoul, though that’s pretty typical of me. For most of the beginning of the trip, I didn't feel connected to the country or the city or the people. It was just another city, another country, other people.

Prior to leaving for Korea, I had found out about the IKAA Conference (International Korean Adoptee Associations), and I decided to go. It was being held the week prior to me leaving, so I thought I’d go as a last hurrah. It was during the conference I decided to go contact my Korean adoption agency to see if there was any news yet. It had been almost exactly a year since I’d submitted my paperwork. I knew some searches took up to 3 years before anyone was found, but I wanted to check anyways. I e-mailed the agency. I heard back 2 days later with the response that they had never received any paperwork from me to initiate a birth search.

It was then that the emotions came out. I was angry that I had waited a year to contact them. I was frustrated that the local agency here in the US apparently didn't make sure this very important paperwork got through to the Korean agency. I e-mailed the Korean agency back that same day asking if I could meet with a social worker and to get a new set of paperwork to fill out to initiate the search (again). I set up an appointment for the day before I left since that was the only day that I had left at that point.

My time at the agency was bittersweet. The social worker showed me a scale model of what the agency grounds looked like around the time I would've been adopted. The agency office is still in the same spot as it was when I was adopted almost 20 years ago. I handed off my paperwork directly into the hands of the social worker, and I left. I walked along the street that was my home for a few short months, although most of the buildings that were there in 1997 don't exist anymore.

October 20, 2016. I got an e-mail. “On your request, we tried to find your birth parents and have the good news for you that we found your birth mother.” I was at school when I got the news. I had just walked into the building to get work done before class. I walked outside to call my parents. I was crying. I was crouching in the grass next to the main entrance, unable to control myself. I was getting stares, but I couldn’t even move. I was overwhelmed.

I had so many questions, but the main question running through my head was, “Why was it so easy?” If it was so easy, the agency could have found her a year ago back when I originally submitted for the search. I didn’t understand the timing. It seemed wrong and inconvenient. My mind immediately jumped to how quickly I could make it back to Korea. Could I go this year even? I had just come back home two months prior.

In the end, it happened. In fact, I'm in Seoul right now. I still don’t understand the timing, though I’ve accepted it at this point. Now, I’m just grateful that this is happening, thanks, mainly, to the support of my parents and a few adoptee friends.

I wasn't sure what to expect, what I was going to ask, or how I was going to handle all of this. But I knew I wanted it to happen, and that was enough.