how I feel today:
DON’T invade my space.
DON’T adjust my dress.
DON’T TOUCH ME.
DON’T tell me how I look.
DON’T point out my new pimple.
DON’T tell me I look better on t.v.
DON’T tell me I look sick or tired, even if I’m sick AND tired…
DON’T comment about everything I do.
DON’T tell me what I should do.
DON’T act like my mother.
DON’T tell me I’m fat.
DON’T wait for me to finish eating if you think I eat too slow and you have other things you want to do.
DON’T ask me if the food is too spicy.
DON’T keep giving me sweets.
DON’T expect sweets in return.
DON’T wave me over like a taxi.
DON’T expect me to go wherever you go.
DON’T expect that I want to do everything with all of you all the time. If I’m doing something then that means I’M BUSY.
DON’T tell me my house is messy.
DON’T test me on Korean when you won’t teach me any Korean.
DON’T treat me like a Korean.
DON’T compare all Americans to Sex in the City.
DON’T keep asking me about my sex life.
DON’T ask me for sex.
DON’T keep trashing my country
DON’T talk only about money and call Americans capitalists
DON’T call us egoists while you look in the mirror at your butchered eyes.
DON’T call us racists while you lighten your skin.
DON’T copy everything we do if you think we’re so evil.
The good is not outweighing the bad. This society is oppressive. All work and no play is making me crazy. The play is as oppressive as the work. It is work. The work stretches out endlessly into the horizon. I just want to get away.
Far, far away.
Hello Korea ! 
But there is much beauty in how you have related your impressions of it.
…so should I actually be glad I was adopted?
Nobody should be glad they were sent somewhere against their will.
Nobody should be glad they were sent to complete strangers.
Nobody should be a commodity for trade.
Nobody should have to leave all they know and love.
Nobody should lose their mother tongue or culture.
Be glad if the country you were raised has civil liberties and if your adopters were decent people. What you know and what you are familiar with will always be a part of you, so you can not just throw that identity away if you are rightful pissed about the preceding, or if your adopting country didn’t embrace you the way it should have and you are always an alien.
International adoption can never be a simple love-it-or-leave-it dichotomy for us…
Visit your motherland and enjoy the romanticized culture in its museum setting. Enjoy the beautiful countryside. Bask in the convenience and excitement of the city. Accept the superficial warmth. And then leave for what you know and are familiar with. Leave the masked dance before midnight…
Because then you will see how this Neo-Confuscianist oppression infiltrates EVERYTHING. It is a disease made worse fed with the greed of the economic miracle. Living with this disease might be second nature to those that grew up here, but as a western-raised person, the horror of seeing so much contagion under our black light is too much to accept.
Living in Korea as a foreign adoptee is highly NOT RECOMMENDED.
i came across your blog a few months ago as i was searching the web for anything written by gyopos in korea. got here one week ago, and i live near you, behind e mart. if you ever want to get a drink, send me a note. i’m not an adoptee but am a gyopo. i’m leaving my email address – i think you’ll have access to it. good luck to you during these first weeks of the new semester.