Message in a Bottle

Inspired by my friend's play "Lost and Found" about various experiences and identity intersections of Korean adoptees.

Dear Korea,

My life journey over the past 30-some years has ranged from smooth, hill-less-ness, and straight, to meandering - wandering even - to seemingly impossible climbs and insurmountable walls. I've walked through parts of my life with relative ease. I've run into open arms sometimes and away from frightening arms other times. Sometimes I've even run from myself. I've crawled slowly through many complexities and over fragile ground. And I've even dragged myself through some of the sharpest of thorns, reaching desperately for something solid and stable to cling to. In some ways I have been given incredible opportunities to have new experiences and expand my life. In some ways I have felt slowed down, halted, and even stunned and hurt by painful and agonizing experiences and truths. It's been a long haul of glorious moments and many hurdles. In those moments that I am the most exhausted, the most miserable, and the most defeated, something wills me to continue to put one foot in front of the other and press on.

Returning to you has been one of the most, if not the most, significant experiences of my life so far. In the month and a half that encapsulates my preparation leading up to my return, the two week time period I was embraced by you, and the couple of weeks back in Minnesota, my entire being went through such a barrage of emotions it's hard to even be able to comprehend them. Some days I wonder how I am even still standing! Since I've been back I have searched and searched and tried to reconcile various components of who I was, who I am, and who I want to be all within the confines of understanding that at my core, there is you, Korea, and there always will be.

I cant step outside and take you in anytime I want to. I know practically nothing about you other than my body and my emotions yearn to once again touch your soil, breathe in your air, and be embraced by that which I consider to be my home home. Trying to figure out my place here when I constantly feel so displaced and trapped in that displacement is difficult. I try my best to do the things that remind me of you in ways that I know how - finding Korean community here, expanding on my research on identity intersections in Korean adoptees, eating and cooking Korean food, and never letting go of what it was like to be held within you for two weeks back in August when I felt truly at home. Yet, without actually being home home, I still feel such a gap - a gaping hole really.

It was on your soil I was born and it was to your soil I returned 32 years later, only to have to leave again. One day I will be back. I will come back to the land, the people, and the culture where I, for once in my life, felt whole and complete in all of my un-wholeness and incompleteness. I felt fully assembled in my disassembled ways. Parts of my life I have never been able to understand or even think about suddenly made sense in ways that I didn't and couldn't understand at the time, but in hindsight, what I do know is that my mind and my body knew where home home was. I knew where I was created and where I touched first. I constantly feel your pull and your presence in my life since returning to Minnesota, and it only grows stronger and stronger.

I had forgotten about you for so much of my life only because I never knew you. How could I remember something I never knew? But in not knowing you and in forgetting you, I never knew that part of who I was and have always been. Day after day, moment after moment, I continually forgot about my own self. Just as I was removed from Korea, Korea was also removed from me. I've spent the last couple of years slowly beginning to find my way back. I will spend the rest of my life continuing to find that confluence in me of the two rivers - the River Han in South Korea and the Mississippi River in Minnesota - and my life will never be separate from where it all began and what has always been a part of me.