“Disability Justice” is Simply Another Term for Love

 

This was the opening keynote speech at the 2018 Disability Intersectionality Summit, in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Oct 13, 2018. The official video recording of this keynote can be found here. 

 

[image of a pile of fall maple-like leaves in yellows and browns on the ground with a large green leaf on top.]

Good morning everyone. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you to the organizers of this—I know it takes an incredible amount of work to put something like this on. And it is often the kind of work that happens behind the scenes and goes unnoticed. Thank you so much for all you’ve done. And I want to extend special thanks to Sandy, who’s been in contact with me—thank you.

 

In addition to the beautiful acknowledgement of the land and indigenous people we had today, I also want to extend gratitude to the people who clean and care for this building. The people who mop and vacuum the floors, clean the toilets, take out the trash and maintain the grounds. The people who built this building and all those who have been displaced from where we are as well.

 

When I started out doing disability justice work, before it was even called “disability justice,” these spaces were so rare. I want people to not take this space for granted because so many disabled people would kill to be here and so many people don’t have access to this type of space. And I know that for a lot of us, this I our political work, this is our life and we seek out these spaces, we create them. I want us to keep remembering that so many folks will never have access to these spaces and how do we keep reminding our selves of who is not in the room? All the different people who are not here.

 

And I know there are brilliant workshops scheduled for today. Workshops that will break down the connections between disability and prisons and immigration and race and gender and sexuality and dance and activism and so much more. I know the analysis will be brilliant and much needed.

 

And I found as I was typing away at my computer, the things that were coming up were not only analysis, but also story and feeling; longing and love for all of you and how precious it is to be here together, even just for a day. To be in a space where we can center disabled people of color, disabled queer and trans folks. To be in a cross-disability space and how rare that is too. Analysis, of course, but heart and breathe and body, too.

 

Because I want to express gratitude for this space—a space to hold disability and intersectionality, a disability justice space—because for decades of my life I didn’t have any spaces like this. I didn’t even have conversations that could hold this. I didn’t have people in my life who I could talk to about these things. And it would have meant the world to me to have a space to talk about how disability, race, gender, adoption, survivorship, violence, cure, queerness and so much more connected and collided in my life, as a disabled child who had no one to talk to about my own lived experience. Who had no one who could support me as I navigated the medical industrial complex on my own as a disabled girl korean transracial and transnational adoptee, surrounded by white abled adults and doctors, nurses and practitioners who often didn’t talk to me about what was happening, except to tell me what a “good patient” I was.

 

As I was preparing my remarks for today, I realized that there was a deep sadness that kept bubbling up in me. A deep longing and aching for what I wish I had had and grief for all I never had. A grief for all the other disabled kids and youth out there who are also so very isolated and the disabled people who would give anything to be able to have this kind of space—many of whom don’t know that these kinds of spaces even exist. Who are surviving, isolated in their families or communities and don’t know that we are gathering here today—that people have been gathering like this.

 

Because that was definitely me. I didn’t know. I was so isolated. I was so alone. And I know that so many of us can relate to that.

 

Because that is often what happens: when we start to connect with our dreams and our visions and our longings, we often tap into our grief and our sadness; our heartbreak and sorrow for what we never had. For the ways we wished our lives could have been. For the spaces we wish existed. For all that still is not.

 

I wish someone had been there to talk about disability in a complex and nuanced way—to be able to hold (what we now call) disability justice. I wish I had known that there was so much more out there, especially during the hardest times; especially when I was inside the medical industrial complex experiencing so much violence. Especially on those mornings when my blisters were still raw from the days and weeks before, but I was forced to put on my painful brace. A brace that I didn’t need to be whole, but others needed me to wear so that I could be “the right kind of disabled child.” One who they needed to be seen as trying to be as abled as possible, trying to fix myself and my walk and my body to be something other than I was. Something other than I am.

 

Someone who now stands here after all the surgeries and the braces and the physical therapy and the forced healing, just as disabled as I was then. Because the cure didn’t work—as I knew it wouldn’t. It didn’t take, even though they really tried.

 

I think our stories are powerful and magnificent; and I hope you all will be able to share some of your stories here with each other because our lives so clearly encapsulate why we so desperately need these kinds of spaces. Our lives are illustrations of disability and intersectionality and there is a wealth of knowledge there for us to learn from and use.

 

And for so many of us, if we don’t tell our stories, who will? If we can’t share our stories with each other, whom can we share them with?

 

I often think about all the things needed to hold my story, just to name a few: someone who understands disability, ableism, abled supremacy; the medical industrial complex, histories and notions of cure, ugliness and the myth of beauty; race, white supremacy, orientalism, adoption, transracial adoption, transnational adoption, the commodification and ownership of children, immigration, forced migration; korea, diaspora, US imperialism, war, borders; the Caribbean, colonization, the US South, anti-black racism, slavery and the US slave trade system; misogyny, patriarchy, sexism, gender, domestic and sexual violence, child sexual abuse; feminism, queerness, queer people of color; rural lands, islands, rural communities. And how all of these intersect with each other.

 

I wonder what the things needed to hold your stories are? I wonder how many pieces of your story weren’t told because there wasn’t anyone who could understand and hold them? I wonder how many parts of all of our stories that we still have never told anyone because of this?

 

My story is just as much a story about korean adoptees and korea, as it is a story about disability, as it is a story about feminism and queerness and growing up on a rural island outside of the U.S. mainland.

 

A part of this symposium is not only revealing the connections of different systems of oppression, trauma and violence with disability; but also the connection of all of these things within our selves and our lives and refusing to cut ourselves and our stories up. Refusing to tell partial stories for other people’s convenience. Refusing to separate our work for the comfort of others.

 

Because this space should not be rare—this should be the norm. It should not be that we have to leave mainstream disability spaces (or even alternative disability spaces) to be able to be our full selves and have whole conversations—about our own lives. It shouldn’t be that we have to leave racial justice and people of color spaces to be able to fully name and examine how abled supremacy and white supremacy work hand-in-hand to oppress and target disabled people of color and all people of color at large. It shouldn’t be that we have to leave queer and feminist spaces to be able to talk about how gender oppression and ableism have deeply intertwined roots. And why it is just as important to abolish the gender binary, as it is to abolish abled supremacy.

 

It shouldn’t be that we have to go to the margins of the margins of the margins of the margins. And don’t get me wrong; I love living out there. There are amazing things and people out there. And it shouldn’t be that that’s the only place where we can be whole.

 

It shouldn’t be that we have to hold our tongues or risk backlash or be met with empty silence just to be able to talk about our own realities and the realities of our communities. Just to be able to talk about our own lives.

 

This is also a part of the isolation we face everyday.

 

In all of our sharp intersectional analysis, we must locate ourselves, our stories and where our lives live in all of their complexities: privilege, oppression, how we have been harmed and how we have been complicit in harm. None of here are innocent.

 

I think of this as a kind of access—liberatory access, that is. Because it is not enough to just make sure that we can get into the room or that the conversation is translated or that we can access the materials. And it is not enough for us to simply get to share what’s important to us (though I know that many times we don’t even get to share that), if no one knows how to hold what we are sharing; if no one knows how to understand and fully engage with what we are sharing. How many times have we been in rooms and shared our truths, only to be met with backlash, avoidance or blank faces and awkward silence because people have not done their own work to educate themselves to be able to meet us? Whether it is in white spaces, abled spaces, hearing spaces, neurotypical spaces? How many times has the conversation continued on as if we never shared at all?

 

I don’t just want technical and logistical access. I don’t just want inclusion, I want liberatory access and access intimacy. I want us to not only be able to be part of spaces, but for us to be able to fully engage in spaces. I don’t just want us to get a seat at someone else’s table, I want us to be able to build something more magnificent than a table, togetherwith our accomplices. I want us to be able to be understood and to be able to take part in principled struggle together—to be able to be human together. Not just placated or politely listened to.

 

I want this for us and I also want this from us. Because the moment we acknowledge intersectionality, it also means we must acknowledge and face ourselves. Because even within this room and out there on the live stream, there are many, many differences between us and between those that aren’t able to join us here. Some of us are immigrants, some of us are not; some of us are survivors of sexual violence, some of us are not. Some of us benefit from light skinned privilege and/or white passing privilege, some of us do not. Some of us benefit from anti-black racism, or hearing supremacy or a world built for cis people. I want us to do our work so that when people whose oppression benefits us, share their truths or their questions, we can meet them in those conversations. We can join them in principled struggle in conversations about activism, strategy, action, accountability and justice.

 

These kind of spaces (like the one we’re in today) often feel like tiny oases  in the middle of a desert, and that is real. And I would also like to offer that they can also serve as a microcosm of the world in which we currently exist and to think of them as any “safer” than anywhere else is an illusion. I would like to offer that multiple truths can exist and that one does not negate the other. This space can be both a welcomed respite from the unrelenting storm we are usually in and—both/and—it can also be a storm as well.

 

When I say “liberatory access,” I mean access that is more than simply having a ramp or being scent free or providing captions. Access for the sake of access or inclusion is not necessarily liberatory, but access done in the service of love, justice, connection and community is liberatory and has the power to transform. I want us to think beyond just knowing the “right things to say” and be able to truly engage. I want us to not only make sure things are accessible, but also work to transform the conditions that created that inaccessibility in the first place. To not only meet the immediate needs of access—whether that is access to spaces, or access to education and resources, or access to dignity and agency—but also work to make sure that the inaccessibility doesn’t happen again.

 

(This is also at the crux of transformative justice work I’m a part of: you work to not only address the harm and the immediate needs the harm created, but you also make sure that the harm does not happen again and that you are working to transform the conditions that allowed the harm to happen in the first place.)

 

Because, as we integrate disability justice into our political work more and more—as we grow it and cultivate it—we must also be mindful that it is not an easy fix, and if anything, disability justice will require us to work harder and dig deeper. Disability justice should not only be about our analysis and political work, but it should also encompass how we do our work and how we treat each other, as fellow disabled people with multiple oppressed identities and experiences. Because I know I am not alone when I say that some of my deepest wounds have come from other disabled people. I know I am not alone when I say that sometimes we can treat each other in more painful ways than those outside of our community have treated us.

 

As we work to change the world, we must also work to change ourselves. And we must support each other in that change. Ableism and other systems of oppression and violence have left their mark on us. We can’t, on the one hand, understand how devastating capitalism, misogyny and criminalization are and then on the other hand, pretend as if they don’t affect how we treat each other and ourselves. Because most of us treat ourselves in ways that we would never treat anyone else. Most of us are in an abusive relationship with ourselves and that helps to lay the groundwork for abuse in the world.

 

Because no matter how on-point our analysis is, if we can’t treat each other well, our work will not get far. Because the systems we are up against will require collective work—if we could have changed them on our own, we would have already done it—and collective work requires that we are in relationship with each other in some way shape or form.

 

It is always so amazing to me that disabled people, who are so incredibly isolated and exiled, will also isolate and exile each other. And I know most of us have been on both sides of this.

 

Now, I am not saying that we all have to be besties with each other or that people don’t need to be accountable for their actions and/or harm they have done—they absolutely do. What I’m saying is that disability justice requires us to understand intersectionality, and intersectionality requires that we learn how to hold and value difference and contradictions. (e.g. you can be both oppressed and privileged by the same identity. You can have survived harm and do harm. These are contradictions that we all hold. I’m sure that all of us have been harmed in this room and all of us have either harmed or participated in harm or looked away from harm in some way shape or form. Whether it’s via our privilege or whatever else it may be.) What I’m saying is that it is not only “those people out there” who need to change, but it is “us in here” as well. What I am saying is that isolation, exclusion and erasure has been destructively wielded against us and our communities, so why would we want to wield them against each other?

 

Because I would argue that “disability justice” is simply another term for love. And so is “solidarity,” “access,” and “access intimacy.” I would argue that our work for liberation is simply a practice of love—one of the deepest and most profound there is. And the creation of this space is an act of love.

 

And if we can’t love each other and ourselves, then what good is any of our work to get free? If we can’t reach out to break isolation and the walls we’ve put up between each other, as disabled people, then we will have already lost before we’ve won any political battle. What good is it if we can wage amazing campaigns, if we all end up hating each other in the end? If we can’t practice addressing the hard things between each other, then how will we ever have a fighting chance to address the hard things in this world that keep our peoples locked up and locked out?

 

We have to work to transform the world, but we can only do that effectively if we can work to transform ourselves and our relationships with each other at the same time. Because our work depends on us and our relationships with each other. And if anyone is worth it, it is us and the generations of disabled children and people coming after us. We have a responsibility to leave them a legacy worth fighting for. To leave them powerful stories of not only how we were able to shut down prisons and I.C.E., but also how we were able to come through harm together, for the better. How we were able to make amends with our disabled kin and heal together. One of the greatest ways to resist abled supremacy is by loving each other. How we were able to practice transformative love together in the face of fear, isolation and heartbreak. And I know that there’s a lot of heartbreak.

 

This is how we practice interdependence. This is how we practice trust and belonging and hope. This is how we practice disability justice in its most powerful and magnificent potential.

 

So, I hope you all have a wonderful symposium and thank you so much for having me.

 

Finding Each Other: Building Legacies of Belonging

*Opening keynote speech at KQTcon 2018, the first national LGBTQ Korean conference in the United States, in New York City on 4/7/18.

 

To listen to the live recording from the conference, click here: KQTcon 2018 Keynote. (Thank you to Asia Pacific Forum for the recording!)

 

[photo of the words “queer korean” and a heart below them written in light in the air at night next to a fire.]

Thank you so much for having me here today.

 

I want to extend gratitude to the folks on the planning team who put this conference together. Anyone here who has ever put on a big event knows that it takes a lot of work. And specifically, I want to acknowledge, not only the logistical and grunt work put into this conference, but the work it takes to go from having an idea to actually deciding to make it a reality. It takes a lot of initiative and courage to put yourself out there like that and step into leadership. So, I want to appreciate all of the different types of labor that you all have put into this.

 

Thank you, because I grew up in and spent most of my life in places where I never had access to any kind of spaces like this. So, I don’t take it for granted and I know how much this kind of gathering would have meant to me when I was younger. I hope none of us take this space for granted because there are so many queer and trans Koreans who would give anything to have and be in this type of space; would give anything to be here.

 

I want to send gratitude to the people who built and care for this building every day and all the unseen and forgotten labor that goes into that. The people who clean the toilets, dispose of the trash, mop and vacuum the floors, care for the grounds. The people whose land this originally was as well as all of those who have been displaced since then.

 

 

I’m honored to be speaking at the first national gathering of queer and trans Koreans in the US. Thank you for inviting me to be here. Thank you all for being here and for being part of this space.

 

I want to acknowledge what it means to have someone like me speak at this conference. What it means to have a queer physically disabled Korean transracial and transnational adoptee woman survivor raised in the Caribbean speak in this space. I never thought that anything like that would happen. I am queer Korean and yet, often times I’ve learned that “queer Korean” or “Korean” doesn’t always mean or include me. And I am sure that many of you have also felt this.

 

I want to acknowledge what it means to have a visibly, physically disabled Korean speak, when most queer and korean specific events or events put on by queer Koreans rarely, if ever, mention accessibility on their event information. Queer and trans Koreans who rarely, if ever can even engage in a conversation with me about what it means to be queer and trans, korean and disabled. How can we talk about gender without talking about bodies and disability? How can we talk about what it means to be Korean without talking about the impact of violence, imperialism, colonization, war, militarization and legacies of abuse and separation on our bodyminds, psyches, hearts and relationships? And that is completey connected to ableism.

 

I want to acknowledge what it means to have an adoptee speak when so many queer Korean spaces haven’t done the best job at making space for us. When so many of us are queer and share the experience of finding “queer and trans family” and searching for our people, our history, our place within the korean diaspora. When we represent the pain of separation, unthinkable survival and resilience in the face of life-altering violence, returning, reunification and the unbreakable longing of Korea and the Korean diaspora.

 

I say all of these things because it is not lost on me that many of the reasons I was invited to speak, are the very things that have made it so hard for me to be part of queer and trans Korean, and Korean american community. I say this because whenever we come together it is our differences that get emphasized and the contradictions they represent become more acute. And we have a lot of differences. We may all be queer Koreans, but we are also many more things. When I think about what it means to be queer and Korean, I cannot separate it from all of who I am.

 

I can’t separate it from being an adoptee or being disabled or growing up in the Caribbean or being a survivor. I can’t separate it from growing up in a small, rural feminist community, surrounded by lesbian and straight women who worked side-by-side to respond to violence against women and children. I can’t separate it from the reason I was even on that island in the first place. Can’t separate it from the surgeries I had once I got to the US that I can’t even remember because I was so young. Can’t separate it from growing up as a visibly, physically disabled child. Can’t separate it from coming into my queerness in the South, in a vibrant and loving queer community that was predominantly Black. Can’t separate it from navigating QTPOC spaces with a visible, physical disability. Can’t separate it from my Korean mother asking if the reason I don’t have a husband is because of my disability.

 

How do you divide-up and measure longing? My longing for queer people and queer love. My longing for Korea and a family to which I will both always belong and never belong. The longing to be able to have at least one conversation with my Korean mother without a translator before she dies. The longing for queer Koreans who want to hold all of who I am, not only when it’s convenient or for political gain. The longing for both queerness and Koreaness, which led me to the most magnificent love I have ever known (or known of) with a queer Korean from the South.

 

I say all of this to say, what is Koreaness? What does it mean if it means something so very different to all of us? What does it mean to be Korean specifically in the US, in this historical moment as the fears of nuclear war rumble through the country? What does it mean to be part of the Korean diaspora in the US, given the role of US imperialism, war and occupation in Korea? In this historical moment of US racial and immigrant justice movements as the legacy of state sanctioned violence against Black people continues to roar forward, against a backdrop of ICE raids, deportations and seething anti-immigrant contempt.

 

I say this to ask, where does my story fit into the legacy of queer and trans Korean people and community? Where does your story fit? And how can we commit to sharing our stories with each other—our whole stories—without fear of losing each other? Because the one thing I know about queers and Koreans is that we know how to find and hold on to each other—sometimes to a fault. We know how to take care of our own, even if we are strangers to each other, because we know we are never truly strangers to each other. And we know we are all we have.

 

For example, I think about the ways that queer APIs in the South would stretch for each other and take care of each other. I think about the times when I opened my home to strangers, without hesitation, who needed a place to stay or a meal to eat or a safe person to be with. I think about the times when that same loving care was extended to me and how these were the ways we learned how to survive. These were the ways we knew we would survive because we did not have the luxury that queer APIs did and do in other parts of the country. This was one of the ways we built small islands of belonging in the middle of a raging river.

 

 

In preparing to write this keynote, there was a part of me that thought, What do I have to say that’s even worth anything? A lifetime of isolation and not belonging anywhere doesn’t go away easily. But then I thought, if I don’t belong here, where else would I belong? How can I not belong here, when I am queer Korean? How can my story not belong here, when my story is queer Korean? As queer and trans Korean people, if we don’t belong to each other, then to whom else do we belong? If we don’t love and accept each other, then who else will?

 

Because on the one hand, it’s true, I don’t belong anywhere, like many of you also probably feel. And on good days, it can feel like a slow, dull, throbbing ache, while other days, it can feel acutely, excruciatingly unbearable. Belonging can be a hard thing to believe in. It can be a hard thing to believe you deserve. It can be a hard thing to be able to even feel.

 

Most days the canyons that loneliness and isolation have carved out inside of me feel impossible to cross. They feel insurmountable and I know most of you in this room have those moments too. But then I think about the powerful legacies I am a part of and the people who have risked their lives for me to have a shot at something more than hopelessness. I remember all the people we’ve lost to loneliness and despair and isolation and longing and pain, whether their own or someone else’s. And I muster myself up and I choose to try; I choose to leap; I choose to love and reach out—to you and to myself. I choose to share; I choose to trust.

 

In that spirit, I want to share a little bit of my story with you; my queer Korean story. It is not the full story by any means, but it is a practice of hope; a practice of trust; a practice of love for you, my kin; and a practice of risk—because hope, trust and love are always risks we take with each other and ourselves.

 

 

I am a queer disabled Korean transracial and transnational adoptee. I was adopted from Korea at 6 months old, by white parents on to the small island of St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands. I was adopted a hair before the peak of Korean transnational adoption and I am one of the few Korean adoptees that I know of who were sent to the USVI.

 

I contracted polio before I was shipped to the US and I arrived in the US needing immediate medical attention and spent most of my childhood in and out of doctors and practitioners’ offices. Most summers I had a surgery on either my ear or my leg—or sometimes both.

 

I experienced so much trauma and violence in the medical industrial complex (MIC) that even now, I still try and avoid it at any cost. On top of the regular onslaught of ableism that disabled children face, I was also sexually abused in the MIC. I know it had everything to do with being a disabled girl of color; being a tiny Korean girl whose body was handed over to a white male establishment by white parents who didn’t know how dangerous that was. I know that the violence of adoption helped to normalize the violence I experienced within the MIC, both the gross abuses of power, as well as things that are still considered standard practices. It was impossible to separate the violent erasing of my disabled self via ableism from the violent erasure of my Korean self via transracial and transnational adoption.

 

I wore a large fiberglass brace on my leg until midway through college and it was excruciatingly hot under the Caribbean sun. It would give me blisters and pain and I hated wearing it. It often made me stand out, along with my limp and being Asian, and to this day, I don’t know what it is like to not have people constantly stare at you; constantly watch you. I often think that disability and being a Korean adoptee contributed to my ability to be a public speaker: I am used to being a spectacle and having people stare at me. People ask adoptees of color just as intrusive and offensive questions as they do visibly physically disabled women of color. You are public property, a game show riddle to figure out, a problem to solve.

 

I never felt like my body was my own. It always felt like someone else’s. It was always a never-ending barrage of how it was wrong: too disabled, too ugly, too awkward, too un-feminine, too undesirable, too Asian, too Korean, too uncontrollable, too tragic. Something to be pitied; never desired, never loved.

 

I was raised in a very rural, tight-knit feminist community. The year I was adopted, my adoptive mother, along with 9 other women started the Women’s Coalition of St. Croix, a direct service organization that helped victims of domestic violence, rape and sexual assault. Before that, there were no services on the island for people to go to and because of this, they became a catch-all for families in crisis. I went to countless Take Back the Night marches and helped stuff envelopes and make purple ribbons. I learned early on that violence was everywhere. It was systemic and more than just a couple of “bad apples.” It was happening in every community.

 

In the early days of the Coalition, I would play in the hallway with kids while their mothers sought support. I remember being young and having our neighbor from up the street and her two children spend the night at our house, so they could catch a plane and escape off the island in the middle of the night to escape her abusive husband. I remember going to court cases about domestic violence with my adoptive mother and playing with the other kids while our mothers met for hours on end at meeting after meeting.

 

I am a child of the movement and I witnessed women organizing for themselves when no one else would.

 

I grew up around Audre Lorde and Gloria Joseph, meeting Angela Davis and getting to hear her speak, getting to watch Sweet Honey and the Rock perform and having conversations about oppression at the dinner table. I learned about oppression from an early age and tried to engage my classmates in conversations about their white or male privilege in grade school. But even through growing up in such a politicized community, no one ever taught me about ableism or what it meant to be Asian, East Asian or Korean. No one ever connected the violence they were fighting against with the violence I was experiencing within the MIC. We never talked about my parent’s roles as colonizers on the island or what it meant for a white straight couple to adopt Korean children and decide to raise them on an island with virtually no other Korean people.

 

I was lucky that I got to grow up around proud lesbians (women of color and white women) who had been with their partners for years, and who were as normal to me as the “you can’t beat a woman” T-shirts we wore for the annual Women’s Race fundraiser. I was lucky to be surrounded by lesbian and straight women who consistently got called “dykes who hated men” and “wanted to break up families” because of the anti-violence work they were doing. Lucky that all through my adolescence, my adoptive mother would tell me over and over, “You know, Mia, if you or any of your friends are gay, it’s O.K. You can always come and talk to me about it.” And though at the time, I thought I would die from sheer embarrassment, I look back now and know how lucky I was, as a queer youth to have that kind of support. I wouldn’t fully come into my queerness until the end of college, but I know that no matter who you are—that was rare for that time.

 

I didn’t grow up culturally Korean and had no support in figuring out how to move through the world as an East Asian woman (adoptee with a disability) in the Caribbean and later the South. I remember another queer Korean adoptee once describing it as being faced with a giant puzzle she was left to figure out on her own, with no picture to follow and no instructions to go on. I remember feeling her words in my heart when she spoke and the way her grief, frustration and resilience seemed indistinguishable from each other in that moment.

 

Even when I was asked to speak at this conference, I was surprised, because my story is not usually the queer Korean story told, but it is a queer Korean story. What do we mean when we say “queer Korean?”

 

My story is not the story most people want to hear or are used to hearing. It’s too disabled or not disabled enough; too adoptee or not adoptee enough; too survivor or not survivor enough. It’s not Korean enough, not Asian enough, not immigrant enough, not queer enough, not Caribbean enough, not American enough. It is, I’m sure, like a lot of your stories: complicated and full of contradictions; full of the hard and soft. It’s not easily categorized into neat boxes and requires people to hold multiple truths at the same time.

 

And yet, it is part of the queer and trans Korean diaspora. And so am I. As are you and your stories.

 

I belong everywhere and nowhere at once. We belong everywhere and nowhere at once.

 

 

I know it can be hard just to show up. It can take a lot of courage just to be present. Belonging must be built and grown collectively. And that is part of what we’re doing here today: the work of building and creating belonging. It is a skill we can learn and teach others, a practice we can always be engaged in and a decision we can choose to make at any given moment.

 

I want to acknowledge all of you, for the labor of showing up and being present (especially those of you who were nervous about it), as well as all of those who aren’t able to be with us.

 

There are many who will never know queer Korean community or some who have been so burned by queer Koreans and queer Korean community that they have given up on it. Or those who are afraid to be part of queer and trans Korean community. Or those who long for it so badly, at the very same time that it terrifies them.

 

We often crave, the very things that scare us: love, community, belonging, vulnerability, trust, accountability, family. It reminds me of that James Baldwin quote: “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without, and know we cannot live within.”

 

I witness this all the time in my transformative justice work. I witness people being terrified of that which they desire most. Whether it is healing, accountability, trust, transformation, vulnerability, truth, belonging or courage. So, they often find endless ways to push it away, distract themselves with something else or they continue to choose their masks again and again.

 

We will all be faced with moments when we have the opportunity to risk lowering our masks—to risk true vulnerability with each other. Those moments when we have a chance to soften and let someone else in and let ourselves out. Those moments when we risk being hurt or having our hearts broken or bruised. Those moments when we can feel just how ill-fitting our masks really are.

 

And we don’t always choose to lower our masks. Many times we choose to tighten our masks closer to us. None of us are perfect and we are all growing. As a queer Korean I talked to earlier this week said, “I’m flawed and we’re all flawed.”

 

But I think everyone who is here for this conference is, in some small way, loosening their mask, even as we cling to it. Even as we peek out a little from behind it. Everyone here, even if it’s small, is letting their desire for queer Koreans, and queer Korean desire, be seen and recognized. Even if many of us would also roll our eyes at the thought of “queer Korean community,” or at the thought of “community.” A lot of us have become jaded and rightfully so. It’s not enough to come together and talk about the good things, we also need to be in principled struggle with each other because that’s how we grow and deepen our connection with each other.

 

I told a queer Korean friend of mine about this conference and they said in a long sorrowful sigh, “I just don’t know what queer Korean community holds for me anymore.” I told another and they scoffed, as if to say, that’s a nice idea, but it’s not possible—or worse, it’s not worth it.

 

Because after all, what is “community?” What is this thing, “community,” that we talk about so much? This thing that we romanticize to no end and that has let so many of us down, even as we refuse to let it go completely? We talk about community all the time, but many of us struggle to know what that actually means and how to actually build it, especially when so many of us are so isolated.

 

I travel from coast to coast and most people I meet do not feel connected to a community. This is especially common for those of us living in the west or under capitalism. Many people don’t even know what community is or how to know if they have it. Folks want to be connected to community, but they don’t feel they are. Even those who are thought of as “in community” often feel lonely and isolated too. And across the board, most people don’t feel like they belong.

 

Maybe this is just a part of what it means to be part of a diaspora. Always feeling in-between; always feeling that familiar longing and grief for what was lost, what was taken, what never should have been. I am part of different diasporas and each one pulls at me constantly. And each one holds that constant refrain: I am, but I’m not; I am, but I’m not.

 

I am Korean, but I’m not Korean. They are my family, but they’re not my family. That is my home, but it’s not my home.

 

I was 25 when I returned to my Korean mother and family for the first time since being given up for adoption when I was a week old. I remember many days, especially in those first days as I struggled with jetlag, waking up on the floor in my parent’s room surprised to find my mother sleeping next to me with her hand in mine. This was a language for which we did not need a translator; a language that couldn’t be translated, even if we had spoken the same language. I remember silently watching her sleep, as she had probably watched me. I remember wishing that I knew her and that she knew me, and knowing that I am her daughter and yet I am not. Knowing that though we share blood, a laugh that fills a room, and an experience that fundamentally changed both of our lives forever, we were also strangers in many ways.

 

We are, but we’re not. We ‘re not, but we are.

We belong everywhere and nowhere at once.

 

 

One of the things I always think of whenever I think about queer and trans Koreans is the way that so many people I know and love stay connected to their families. Though their families often do not understand or are hostile to their queer and trans identities, they refuse to let each other go. Though they might have to hide who they are, for decades, maybe even their entire life, they continue to return to each other. To me, there is something so powerful about that kind of love.

 

I know it is not perfect and there are many painful complexities about it. I know that the silence that is expected in return for connection is dangerous, harmful and neither just nor right nor fair. I know that it can be hard to tell guilt, shame, denial and abuse from love. And—both/and—there is something so deeply magnificent about the ways that we can still love and care and show-up for each other, even through our pain. In the ways that a heart can break and still keep loving at the same time. And how in so many ways, that has everything to do with who we are as a people, both as queer and trans people and as Korean people.

 

I think about the ways that we find each other as queer and trans people, the way that we find each other as queer and trans people of color—as queer and trans Koreans. The ways that we are often raised outside of our queer and trans communities and culture and language and history, but how we find our ways to each other and teach, create and grow our culture together. And I think about how this mirrors many Korean adoptee’s journeys.

 

I think about the many queer and trans Koreans that I’ve known who did not live on the coasts or in big cities and how we were able to find each other and stay connected, even in the face of incredible isolation—we still held on to each other.

 

“Family acceptance” is not just about our biological or immediate families, it is also about “family” in the ways that queer folks have reclaimed that term and made it our own—made it into a balm for our lives. I’m talking about the way queer and trans folks make up our own kind of family. We are kin.

 

It’s not enough to only talk about the homophobia and transphobia we face inside Korean community and family, because we also do damage to each other. We also reject each other, abuse each other, push each other away and fear one another. We also gloss over our differences in favor of convenience, denial or fear. And in many ways it can be even more painful because we are each others kin—we are each other’s queer and trans Korean kin. The stakes are so high and the fall is so great when things go awry—those canyons are so deep. And we often don’t have resources to turn to, as queer and trans people of color, and many of us suffer in silence for years, sometimes for entire lifetimes.

 

We have a lot of work to do within our community, our relationships and our selves.

 

We have to prioritize healing, both individually and collectively because they cannot be separated from each other. I would bet that most of us in this room have at one point or another struggled with our mental health. I would bet that most of us have experienced some type of abuse either from our families, within our relationships or even within our organizing. All of us have trauma and we all carry generational trauma in our bones, breath and cells.

 

How can we work towards any kind of liberation, if we can’t treat each other well? If we can’t build and rebuild trust when it is broken? If we can’t build healthy relationships? If we can’t let each other be human and make mistakes? If we can’t take accountability for harm we’ve caused? If we can’t support survivors in their healing and people who have harmed in their accountability? Most of us can’t even navigate conflict well, let alone violence, harm or abuse.

 

How can we ask other people to treat queer and trans Koreans well, if we can’t even treat ourselves and each other well?

 

What I want for us is healing and transformation. I want us to fight with everything we have to invest in building the skills and commitment we need to be able to face ourselves and each other—and to do it lovingly. To be able to speak our truths and tell our stories and our secrets without fear of losing each other. I want us to be able to risk being vulnerable again and again because you cannot build trust without vulnerability, and true love cannot exist without trust. I want us to call on our queer super powers of desire.

 

As queer people, we know the power of desire and we know how political desire is. And I’m not just talking about who you sleep with, I’m talking about desire in a much more expansive way. I’m talking about desire as that which pulls us towards liberation and that which pulls us towards aliveness. I am talking about that hunger that won’t let us sleep and makes us ache for something more, something true.

 

I want us to learn to desire the true, the messy, the complicated—the human. I want us to desire each other as queer and trans Koreans. I want us to desire queer Korean family and community. I want us to desire queer Korean love.

 

I think about what it means for those of us who continue to show up for this thing that we call “queer Korean community.” Even through our heartbreak and disappointments, even through our hesitations and fear. This is the kind of love and desire that I want us to continue to practice. This is the kind of hope that I want us to live into and pass on to the next generation of queer and trans Koreans who will struggle to find their place and wonder if they belong. Let us be able to meet their longing and fears with our longing and love, so that we may be able to embrace them and all of who they are with all of who we are, whispering, “Yes. Yes, you belong.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Still Choosing to Leap: Building Alternatives

Remarks from the closing plenary, “Revolutionary Organizing Across Time and Space,” at the INCITE! Color of Violence 4 Conference, March 26-29, 2015, Chicago, Illinois.

 

I am engaged in the work of building transformative justice responses to child sexual abuse with the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (The BATJC). We are a local collective and we are not a nonprofit because we believe that it will not allow us to take the kinds of political risks necessary for transformative justice and community accountability (TJ/CA). No one is paid and we work to get everything for as free as we can. We are not “volunteers,” but rather we understand this as part of our life’s work.

I am interested in our internal work. The work with each other inside of our movements, inside of our organizations and groups, inside of our relationships. The way that our analysis by itself is not enough, because what good is it if we can run great campaigns if we all end up hating each other in the process? If it means that leaders who used to be friends now don’t work together to the detriment of our movements? What good is our amazing analysis of TJ/CA if our intervention to violence tears apart our community, and then we need an accountability process for our accountability process?

Because it is easy to hate a white police officer, but what do we do when the violence and abuse is coming from people who look like us? People we rely on? People we love? What do we do when the violence is happening inside of our homes, our relationships, our communities? Inside of our political groups, collectives, organizations and movements?

Our inability to respond well to intimate violence and abuse continues to undermine our other political work. How is it that we still can’t respond well to one of the most common experiences on the planet that our peoples face?

This is the moment we are in.

Because it is clear to me that we don’t lack political analysis or people power or deeply compelling work. But I am interested in what happens next: the way we come together and then break apart. The way we can mobilize people against the state, but when it comes to intimate violence within our own communities, we can’t ever seem to find enough people; or they are there in the beginning, but are nowhere to be found in the following months; or we end up replicating our own versions of criminalization, exile and “other.” It is not enough to say, “community-based responses to violence” if we simply just end up replicating the state.

I am interested in what we are going to do when we have a world without prisons—that’s right, I said, “WHEN.” Because it is going to happen: we will win. I have no doubt in our ability to shut down the prison industrial complex forever and throw away the keys. It is going to happen.

But then what? What will be our alternatives for dealing with violence, harm and abuse?

We need to build alternatives. Yes, we need resistance—it is crucial. Our communities are being attacked and erased at every turn. Yes, we need to resist against the systems that are targeting us—most definitely. AND (BOTH/AND) we also need alternatives. Because even if we abolish prisons tomorrow, we will still need a way to deal with conflict and harm and violence. Even if violence and abuse ended tomorrow, we will still need a way to deal with the impacts of trauma (individual and collective trauma, immediate and generational trauma). Generational trauma will be with us for some time.

And of course these are not mutually exclusive to each other. We can resist in ways that build a new world. And I am not saying we need to do everything all at once all the time. On the contrary, I am saying the exact opposite. That instead, we get clear about our different roles and work in service of a shared vision, and that we are strategic about those roles. That those of us who are working to resist and hold back the tide for one more day, one more night, do so for those of us who are working to build alternatives. And that those of us who are working to build alternatives stay grounded in the current urgency and reality of intimate and state violence. That we work in concert with each other so that we are not responding to immediate needs in ways that undermine our long term visions (and in ways that perpetuate the very systems we are fighting); AND that we are also not building utopic politically pure castles in the sky that have no relevance to our current conditions. We need both and we need them together and we need them to be in service of one another.

Because we are good at resisting. We are good at fighting for the world we don’t want. We are good at analysis and analyzing things up and down (and sometimes into oblivion). We are skilled at naming what we don’t want. I think we are less skilled at naming what we do want; our visions for liberation. And not just vague things like, “ending white supremacy and heterosexism,” but how are all the children going to get fed? Who will clean the toilets? Who will take out the trash? Who will cook the food?

We know that most people who experience violence—any type of violence—turn to their intimate networks first: their best friend, their family, their partners, a neighbor. Most people don’t call the cops or an anonymous hotline or even seek social services. They turn to their intimate networks. So if we know this, then that is where we need to build.

I hope we are in a moment where we are realizing that we need to put half if not more of our time and resources into building alternatives and building in our intimate networks. BOTH a reclaiming of what has been stolen from us, as well as a reimagining of what can be. As well as a revealing of what we are already doing and the strategies of resilience that are already embedded in our lives. For example, I think about queer chosen family. No one took a class or got a grant to learn how to do that. We did it to save our lives and in the process, created a new world for each other.

We are at a moment where we have almost two decades of shared language and thinking around TJ/CA—obviously the work has been going on forever, just because you name something doesn’t mean you invented it—but in terms of a shared language and political framework, we have had tremendous contributions from so many great people and groups. We are in a moment where TJ/CA is gaining more and more visibility and where we are able to share examples of our responses to violence like never before. I feel incredibly lucky to be alive in this moment doing TJ/CA work and I extend daily gratitude to the folks who have come before me in this work as well as the brave and dear revolutionaries who I have the honor of working with.

We are in a moment where we are building off of this work knowing that practice yields the sharpest analysis.

How are we building the world we long for in our day-to-day? After the protests, after the conference, after the event, outside of the meetings? During the unsexy times, in our most mundane moments?

This is not about perfection, but practice. Falling down and getting back up. Spectacular failures and learning how we can be and do better. Resilience in the face of fear; Humility in the face of ego; Faith in the face of hopelessness. This is about understanding organizing as a spiritual practice that is just as much about our souls as it is about our goals.

Sometimes I think it is strange to speak about this work from a microphone because so much of the work I am engaged in is quiet work, tender work. It is witnessing people in their most vulnerable moments around their histories of child sexual abuse, the times when they don’t want to be seen. This work is about nuance, complexity and contradiction, not sound bytes and drawing lines in the sand. It is messy and sticky work that reminds me every day that notions of “good” and “bad” people are fantasies that simply serve to make us feel more comfortable, but ultimately don’t serve to make us more liberated. I don’t believe in “good” and “bad” people, I believe that given the right conditions, any of us can be an asshole; any of us can abuse power.

How do we leave a legacy worth fighting for? How do we learn to invest in each other as our greatest resource? Because we will need each other to build the kind of world we want; liberation is a collective practice. How can we cultivate a sense of shared commitment to each other and understand this as part of our organizing? How do we cultivate the kind of commitment to each other that can withstand failures, heartbreak, disappointment, gossip, mistakes and conflict?

The kind of commitment to each other and love for one another that allows us to continue to leap together, knowing that we will fall and mess up and make mistakes and get bruised. Knowing that we will have to brush ourselves off and climb back up the mountain to do it all over again tomorrow. How do we cultivate that kind of commitment? One where we still choose to leap. Together.

Thank you.

Video: Recognizing Each Other: Adoptees of Color

Recognizing Each Other Video Transcript

Just over a month ago, I met up with two other queer adoptees of color to talk about adoption.  Mariama Lockington is a queer black transracial adoptee and So Yung Kim is a queer korean adoptee, both of whom have done writing and work around adoption.  (We had over an hour and a half’s worth of footage, so it took awhile to whittle it down and pull out some of the highlights and pieces from what was shared.)

As with my last video*, whenever I get to hear queer adoptee of color stories, I am entranced.  I crave adoptees of color that want to talk about adoption, what it was like for us growing up and how we are still being impacted by adoption—and always will be.  I crave time and experiences with other adoptees of color that is not mitigated through, by white people, white parents and non-adoptees.  It is so rare that I get to hear queer adoptees of color talking about our lived experiences.

I love hearing our words (all of them, in whatever way they come tumbling out) and feel ever-so appreciative, especially knowing how long I went without ever hearing any of our voices tell our own stories and stumble through sharing and asking and loving.

As adoptees, it is so important for us to tell our stories and to leave evidence for each other.  We are often isolated, individualized or discouraged from connecting our stories with each other.  There may be adoptees who will watch this in secrecy, who have never met another adoptee, who never talk about being an adoptee with anyone in their life or don’t think about how adoption impacts them.  It is not easy.

Our stories are all so different and complex and they all have value–we have value.

We will not be polarized, made one-dimensional and pitted against each other.  I don’t want to be used by non-adoptees to prove, justify, and support arguments about adoption that don’t include us, profit off of us or don’t speak to our whole, full and various lived experiences.  There is no “good adoptee” or “bad adoptee,” as many of us may have come to understand.  We are complicated, our lives are complicated, our histories are complicated; our identities are complicated.  And as adoptees of color, all of us have the lived experience of being people of color who were adopted, and that thread connects us all.

Immense love and gratitude to Mariama and So Yung for sharing some of your story, knowing that it’s not all of your story.  Thank you for your honesty and humor.  And most importantly, love and gratitude for being visible (as adoptees), for being recognizable to me and for recognizing me.

(*This is the second video in a series of videos I am making for Leaving Evidence.  They are video snap shots of some of the brilliance and deep complexities that we hold individually and collectively, as a people.  We must leave evidence for each other.)