You can never go home.

America will never be the same. (for me)

Korea will never be the same. (for me)

I will also forever think of Korea historically now, from each day forward.

Where is home?

Is this the price of finding me?   Losing a (false) sense of place?

I feel like I found what I came for, but now what?

I understand now why so many adoptees come, go, return, go, return again, go, return again, maybe stay, maybe end it all.  We bounce back and forth – neither place satisfying.  Like citizens of nowhere.

The tree and its roots is a recurring symbol of family and, for the adoptee, loss.

But to be so literally rootless is a truly strange feeling.  We adoptees are more like spanish moss, draping ourselves on others’ branches, trying to suck sustenance out of thin air.

I think back on my friend Joe and envy him.  Living a mile from his elementary school, never living outside of his home town, his best friends were friends from childhood, his entire extended family a stone’s throw away.  His community activism an extention of his love for family.  When he came to visit me in Seattle, he wasn’t interested in the beautiful scenery or what the city had to offer:  he wanted to meet my friends, my community, my extended family, and there was none to show him save my son David. (My daughter Sara was in the Netherlands)

I want to float on some wind and be carried to some distant island and populate a Gallapagos, because we are a different species now and deserve our own environment.  This would be an appropriate fate.  To develop our own roots and new ways to live and laugh and procreate.

But I am left here, hanging by a mossy tentacle on the branches of others.  And it feels so tenuous.