November 6th

[Photo of a tree in the forrest surrounded by fog. Photo by Mia Mingus]

 

Today is November 6th, the day I was brought to the adoption agency to be adopted, the day the adoption agency recorded as my birthday, and the day I celebrated as my birthday for 25 years. It is the day I left my birth family, never knowing if I would return. It is the day I left my first home, my first land. It is the day that a strain of longing was born inside of me for something that I do not even know how to name or explain. It has eaten away at my insides, at times turning me into an empty shell of myself. It has taught me how loneliness can be a comforting friend.

 

My birthday, as is the case for many adoptees, is a complicated web of sticky feelings, some of which I decide to feel or not feel and some that overtake me without consent, pulling me in, down, back and under. November 6th got recorded as my birthday by an industry that profits off of the erasure of my birth family, the convenient construction of someone with no past. My life did not begin when I was placed for adoption; I was already here. Today is not my birthday.

 

I hate the confusion that surrounds my birthday. People still getting confused, “so which birthday do you celebrate?” “When is your real birthday?” Since finding out the truth, sometimes I would rather deny my birthday all together, no celebrations, no worries about what or how birthdays are supposed to feel like to someone who does not even know how to think about her own birth.

 

It only marks another diasporic year that I have spent separated from pieces of myself that may or may not even exist; pieces of my self that made me, created me, but don’t know me. It only marks a deep sadness at having celebrated something that was so wrong for so long, something that wasn’t real, the way sometimes entire decades of my life have felt.

 

It is a part of me, but it is not a birth. It is more like a death, a loss or a closing. And it means talking about things that sit so close to my heart, things that I don’t even completely know how to hold, let alone say. I have been missing korea before I even knew what “missing” was.

 

Having been ripped from one piece of earth and shoved into another, sometimes I think the only land I know, the only land on which I belong, is the shifting tides of the ocean. The place that has always brought me solace and has been able to hold my shifting adoptee disabled korean queer girl self. Sometimes I think that what so many of us are doing, the bravery of finding home and attempting to create it, is something I know nothing about. Something I have no business being a part of. I have no home, but myself, and even that isn’t always true. Belonging is something I know nothing about. Living on the other side of dreaming is nothing I know about, having only ever had dreams, distant blurry memories, to keep me alive.

 

I know I existed before November 6th, even if there is no trace, even if I can’t remember how my mother smelled or my sisters’ six inquisitive eyes gazing at me. I know I knew something about home at sometime, even if it, like everything else got re-written and stamped and filed away.

 

Maybe all adoptees find home in their own ways, maybe some of us never do; maybe our homes are in the leaving, in the moving; in the shifting of the wind that carried so many of us past the horizon. Maybe I belong nowhere; maybe that is how they like it—a living, breathing, constant experiment.

 

36 years ago I left my very first home for another temporary home, a foster home, before being adopted. Six years ago I left Atlanta, the first place that ever really felt like home, to build home in Oakland. Maybe this is a re-birth of some sort, into a second chance at belonging and creating home, a kind of returning all on to itself.

 

I know I knew something about home at sometime, maybe I will find it again.

 

It was not erased, just like me.

 

 

 

bodylandhome

If you asked it, this body would tell you that it is tired.  That i run it harder than i should.  That i don’t take care of it the way it deserves.  It would tell you about sterile white lights and sterile white voices beaming in on it from every direction.  Demanding results, scouting for hidden keys.  It could show you the places that were dug up, the pieces of it that were taken, the scars on the bodyland that will never fade.  It could show you where tendons were moved, sensation was stolen–a casualty of a battle lost long ago by both sides.

It would show you how i have my sister’s laugh, my father’s face, my mother’s hands and spirit.  It would tell you that there were memories past on that only exist in feeling, color and dreams.  It could recount the strength of my mother’s arms, the way she cried and her pain in letting me go, passing me on to my mother’s joy and oblivion in taking me in. It would tell you that i was already gone.  It would tell you that maybe i was never found and that i am still finding.  It would tell you that it loves me, even though i don’t know how to love it.

If you asked it, it would tell you that we made it through; made it out.  And we are trying to make it home.

–

(This piece was written at the Azolla Stroy* queer and trans of color disabled and chronically ill love and zine making workshop at the 2010 Allied Media Conference. Thank you to all of the amazing people that were there and shared such powerful, tender, moving and inspiring pieces of yourself.  i love yall.  Look out for the Azolla Story Zine!  *The Azolla Story is a closed online community-movement-home for queer disabled people of color. )

there are many borders we share

(excerpt from UC Davis Pride Week Keynote Address)

My longing for queer community that reflects me and where I can bring my whole self is palpable.  And in many ways because our families don’t often reflect us as queer people, we are adopted.  As adoptees, I think there are many borders we share with queerness (and disability).  We are queered as adoptees.

The longing we have as queer people for each other, for our families, for our people and histories and legacies is something that we carry with us.   It is a part of us.  We love our families but they do not always love, accept or desire us.   What do we do with that longing?  Where does it go?  Where does it live?  It pushes us to build our own families, with other queer people.  Or it pushes us away from queer people and queerness, away from ourselves, into the families and communities that help us to survive, but not truly live.  It pushes us to cut off the queer people we love when they hurt us, or when we hurt them, because it asks us to risk isolation, pain and hurt again and again; it pushes us to choose between safety and connection, often times compromising one for the other: we can be safe, as long as we aren’t connected; or we can be connected but never safe.   It pushes us to build our own chosen families and relationships, but also keeps us from returning to the very families that raised us, that we were birthed into; from returning to the very places we were raised, the very land we’re from.

I think about the idea of returning a lot.   As an adoptee and as a queer person.  What “returning” means for many of us as queer people, especially queer people of color, since we are often times pushed out of where we are from.  What returning to our land and people means.   I think about how our families and communities may not have had what they needed to be able to keep us; or how we didn’t have what we needed to be able to stay.  I think about why we were “given up” or why we chose to leave.  I think about how many of us are from rural places, but live in metropolitan cities because we can’t go back or don’t want to go back to where we came from.  I think about my own trip back to Korea the first and second time and what it means to “find family” and how we create belonging in our lives.