poem from this semester:

Inheritance of a father –

This room looks like it’s seen some wear

I count the heavy cracks in the ceiling, wondering if it will all fall

Leaving drywall crumbs across the coffee stained floor,

in the tissues undoubtedly brought in for the occasion. I chuckle nervously. You

Appear in the doorway, sparse patches of hair tousled and too-short corduroys

bunched

bringing in a gust cold Seoul air with you, a string curse words, unusually dark skin,

I notice.

Your eyes jump at the incredible resemblance you see in your female version, 30 years younger.

Silence

makes the short distance between us seem longer as we realize in dumb surprise

I’ve inherited your cross eyes, unable to make steady contact.

Since that day I’ve forgotten

your name  (something Korean)

but not the expression of wonderment & pleasure that

transfigured your lips as they parted mid profanity. 

i met another korean adoptee last night who said: shit man, really, you’re like the first korean adoptee i’ve met who isn’t totally fucked up. i’m serious. how do you do it, how do you be normal like that.

i guess i may seem well-adjusted to an unwitting eye. 

it has taken almost twenty years for me to realize and grapple with the fact that i am not white - and now i am working on discovering and articulating exactly who i am and where i come from. it hasn’t been easy, still isn’t.

As I have quoted before from The Spirit of Adoption (Gritter), “We must be careful not to sanitize, sentimentalize, or even glamorize the pain of adoption; it is really miserable stuff, and it is intensely personal. It is interior. The pain of adoption is not something that happens to a person; it is the person. Because the pain is so primal, it is virtually impossible to describe.”

I’ve felt inexplicably upset with people around me lately and their inability (or so I perceive) to understand what I’m going through as an adult adoptee post-reunification. It’s unfair, I know it is, but I can’t help feeling that I am a different girl now than I was four months ago when I didn’t know my Korean parents whereabouts. I am a different girl, and my heart is sore because I feel alone in my experience and am beginning to realize all the moments when I’ve felt alone before — in terms of being a Korean adoptee in MN and in terms of being different, defying societal expectations again and again, unintentionally until I began to do it bitterly, with intention. You know? I deleted 300 of my Facebook friends and put half of my info on private to the 100 people who make a genuine effort to connect with me as a friend. I don’t need to talk about adoption all the time, but I would like people to treat me with compassion — not as a punk Asian-American anomaly or as a person to be fetishized even though it does get boring and whitebred/bread in Northfield, or as anything really, except for me. I need people to see what I like, and help me build castles of creativity, community, sustainability……bla bla. I do not want to be the other, I do not want to be an example, I do not want to be a photograph. I am a human being.

My other tumblr is: http://papillonpirate.tumblr.com/