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.
