We Owe Allegiance To No Crown

Homecoming Reunion

One year ago I returned to the U.S. for the first time in eight years to tie up some loose ends, visit friends and show my partner parts of my past lives. We arrived June 28th and spent a few days, including the fourth of July in New York City where I once worked in fashion in my late twenties. On July fourth, we went to Nathan's Hotdog Eating Contest in the morning and saw half the competition, the women's, before a huge storm rolled in and flooded the streets with shin-deep water, canceling the men's altogether.

In the late afternoon, I boarded a mega-yacht to go on a dinner cruise on the river, which also brought floated by the Statue of Liberty. That was my first time seeing it in person. Two dear friends from the city joined my partner and I. We watched the afternoon turn into evening, the city lights come alive, and fireworks later that night.

All of the aforementioned made the day unforgettable, but excellent company is what made the experience truly magical.

Freedom & Independence

It's been a decade since I cut all ties with my adoptive family and it's unfortunate to say that my life has never been better without them in it. That is an unfortunate truth for Korean Adoptees who have chosen to go this same way. Most people cannot imagine being without a family, imagining life to be very lonely, and will accept even the most toxic of family dynamics to stay part of the group. I am not one of those people. Being unfettered was liberating and gave me the the independence I desperately needed from judgement and other's expectations.

Jung once said something to the effect that you can never really become your own person until after your parents are dead. If this is the case, I have two families dead to me now. But, in the past ten years, I have dug deep and pursued being the person I want to be. More willing to accept my imperfections, my flaws, to forgive myself and others. I am free.

My adoptive mother has never been keen on talking about my adoption with me. When I asked her what the process was, she said there was none. When I was in my mid-twenties and told her I was traveling to Seoul, the city of my birth, she cried. When I wrote to her a couple of years ago asking for my baby pictures and any adoption-related documents, so I could begin the search for my birth parents, she did not reply.

I was told that my adoption was private, I was born in Seoul, and Denver Colorado was my port of entry. I have seen photos of two women who were described to me as my grandmother and aunt. I was also told that my Korean father divorced my Korean mother and because women are second class citizens he got everything in the divorce, including me and my sister. Apparently, my Korean grandmother was taking care of me because my Korean father wasn't. She was worried something might happen to her. My adoptive mother's husband at the time was a U.S. Army serviceman who had been stationed in the Republic of Korea for one year, and they decided to take me home with them.

It all sounds so simple. So neat and tidy. Mine is like so many KAD stories, a White Saviorism storyline, which may or may not be true. What my adoptive mother failed time and time again to realize was that by withholding information, the emotional guilt-trips and manipulations, her inability to try to understand me seeing my every attempt to do so as some kind of personal attack, was what made me decide so stop speaking with her and my adoptive family.

How could I not be grateful for being saved, given a new and "better" life? Shouldn't I have appreciated that I was now with complete strangers speaking a foreign language, and being told to call them "mother" and "father"? To not see the benefit is was for me to also live in a place that was anything but familiar, and relearn how to behave acceptably in this foreign society and culture?

Every once in a while, a White person asks me if I knew I was adopted when I was a kid. I can't help but be puzzled by this question. Every KAD I have spoken to about this has the same answer I do: I have always known.

I clearly remember the day I came to total awareness... I stood up on my toddler legs and looked down a slightly curving street at these white and light pastel-colored houses all in a row. Each driveway and lawn, exactly the same shape, size and incline. Beyond the houses I could see yellow-brown flatland, and beyond those were white-capped purple mountains in the distance. I recall distinctly thinking, "Everything has changed."

I felt wonder-filled looking at those distant mountains. Mountains always feel familiar and friendly to me. Seoul is surrounded by mountains and I wonder if seeing the Rocky Mountains was a source of comfort for me back then, as seeing mountains in all their glorious shapes and sizes are for me now.

With so little information to go on, I have constantly teetered on the brink of despair with ever finding out anything more about my own history, let alone finding my birth mother or family. Most recently I was reminded of how adoptees are denied certain fundamental rights, like knowing their own medical history. This month I turn forty-seven and women of my age may be experiencing the perimenopause. I have had to be my own mother with all of my own biological experiences my entire life. An indicator of symptoms and how going through menopause will be for me would be best done by speaking with and observing my biological mother. But I can't.

To say I was a little jealous of other KADs, being able to help focus their own searches by referencing their adoption agencies, is an understatement. Some posts in a Korean Adoptees Facebook group and conversations with a new friend made me realize that there was a significant process involved in my adoption, despite not going through one of the adoption agencies.On May 18, 2024, I finally decided to take action in discovering more about myself went to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration website and put in what's called a FOIA request. The acronym FOIA stands for the Freedom of Information Act, which provides me with the right to request to access records about myself from any public agency.

My request was fulfilled and I accessed the three documents sent to me on the first day of July. Two of the three documents were letters. The third was a digital copy of my Naturalization Certificate. The photo you see above of baby me is the one that is on the certificate.

With these three documents, the forensic investigation begins in earnest. Soon I will submit a second FOIA request for my entire file of which the certificate is a part of. In the meanwhile, I am still processing the many new things I have learned, and confirmed some of what I had already been told. I will share one of those now. I discovered that I was residing in Fort Carson when I became a U.S. citizen. If you look here on the map, you can see the gently curving roads, one of which I lived on, that I can still see so clearly in my mind's eye. My earliest childhood memory, confirmed. Is there anything more freeing, than confirmation of the truth?

Currently I am spending this year's Independence Day sitting in a pub in New Malden, London, in the U.K. waiting for an English friend to come join me. As well as being a significant day in the states, here, today, millions will be casting their votes in the polls for the general election. You may be wondering why I am in New Malden. It is known as London's "Koreatown". Once she arrives, we will stroll the streets and eventually find dinner at one of the Korean restaurants here to celebrate our friendship.

However you are spending this day, I hope you are doing something delightful and meaningful with people you love.

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A friend has been telling me for ages to write a book, a memoir, of all my wild past-life experiences. Maybe I'll write a book about my life when I'm older, maybe around 80 (if I am blessed to live that long). I've decided to keep this diary instead.

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