Min Soo-Lee

[I don't think I've ever written about being a Korean adoptee before. I apologize in advance for the muddle of ideas and feelings undoubtedly inherent in writing about this topic.]

A few years back, a Minnesota Monthly article caught my attention. It was an article about Korean adoptees living in the Upper Midwest - mostly Minnesota (there are more Korean adoptees living in Minnesota than there are lakes). I think it was the first time I really thought hard about the other people living in my situation. Sure I knew other Korean adoptees, and had even become good friends with many, but our bond was mostly due to the fact that we got along, not necessarily because of our relatively unique heritage. The article listed a book, The Language of Blood by Jane Jeong Trenka as an especially poignant account of a Korean adoptee growing up in Minnesota.

I admit to being somewhat ambivalent about tracking down this book. On one hand, I yearned to discover an account of childhood I could really relate to. I wanted to hear the stories whose grasping tentacles of details immediately drew me into an episode of my life. On the other, I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to tread down that path, maybe discovering things I didn't want to address or bring to the surface. Really, this subject goes to the core of who I am, what I define myself as, and what others define me as. I love the life I had growing up and the life I'm living now, so why question anything? In the end, I still felt that maybe this book was the thing I was missing, or it could help me find that thing, the thing that could better define for myself who I really was.

It took me two years, but I finally read it.

I'm not sure if I liked it or not. I have to admit, delving into my status as adoptee has never been at the top of my list of things to do. Reading this book (and, um, writing this blog) make me face this reality in my life head on, something I've never been very good at.

It's impossible for me to point to the moment I realized that I was adopted - it feels like I've always known. It's also impossible for me to place a finger on how my life would have been different in Korea. People always ask me that, but to me, it's kind of like asking them how life would've been if they had grown up where their distant ancestors did. "So, Johnny, do you ever think of how your life would have turned out had your ancestors never came over the drink 200 years ago?"

I'm happy with the life I've had in America. I honestly know no other way. But I do know that I've never been treated by anyone in my family as anything but their own flesh and blood. Truthfully, my mom and dad raised me with more love and caring than many of my friends who live with their biological parents. I'm a strong believer that it's nurture, not nature, that carries the load in childhood development.

Still, seemingly innocuous comments cut the sharpest sometimes. It probably comes up most often with people I don't know very well and it's never malicious, but it always makes me want to quickly change the subject. People will make offhand comments about adoptive parents somehow not caring as much for or having some sort of distant or neglectful relationship with their children. That hurts. Or when someone proclaims, usually in some fit of self righteousness, that they're not going to have children - they're going to adopt from some third world country. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for that! But again, the implication is that somehow we needed saving and we should be eternally grateful for our adoptive parents for plucking us out of some sort of hellhole, the life of the orphan who appears nightly on television, picking through garbage as the seagulls circle while the benevolent old white man idly strokes the child's mangy head as he implores the developed world to send "Just a dollar a week."

There's nothing wrong with charity. What is wrong is the notion that a single act, adopting a child, can define an entire life. If he succeeds, then, "Bravo! he would've never done that in his home country." If he fails, then, "Well, at least he's not living in Country XX." Good parents are good parents regardless of whether they gave birth to their children. That's only part of the equation - the initial condition as we say in engineering. But its not by any means the most important. It's how that child is raised and the person he becomes that should be the true test of merit or good parenting.

It's hard to parse out my true feelings or to reflect on the person I've become through the filter of being an adoptee. Would my life be different if I lived in Korea? Of course, but different doesn't imply that it would be worse, it would just be different. Someday I will travel to my motherland in search of my biological family and my lost culture, but my roots are and will always be back at home in Minnesota, and that's where I'll return.