As the realization that art school prospects are slim and cutting my own throat sinks in, I put my mask back on in preparation for the jobby job I have to do next week.  I am fully prepared to cut my own throat and milk the system for as long as I possibly can, even if I am unable to complete a degree.  The question is not if, but when, and I’ll have to cross the how question later and pray to God someone will hire a quinquagenarian (over fifty – I had to look that up!) as I compete with co-eds for student jobs.  I have to pay down as much debt as I can here in Korea in the upcoming year and a half.  Whether I put it off an additional year is the big question, though I am setting a goal of applying before I hit half a century, so two and a half years is the latest.

Behind the scenes the hours fly past as I work on the latest TRACK projects, punctuated by chick flicks (which remind me of the relationships I almost but never had but still I toy with that pain and possibility).  The work is a blessing for all of us at TRACK, as it gets our minds off of our collective and individual loneliness/despair/alienation.  It’s just how it is.  It’s a taking-care-of-business mindset, a steel resolve to just plow forward.  We get things done.  And even the pain of getting it done (for example, rounds of 14 emails between three of us trying to edit a Korean’s interpretation of our English for meaning so we can be assured their Korean translation is on point – and people think good German translations of English are hard to obtain!) And it’s tedious work.  But somehow, we make it happen.  It is much better to do than talk…

The work is salve to wounds, and empowerment in a state of helplessness.  These days: these days are like all the planets are out of alignment and everyone I know and care about‘s personal lives are in a state of collapse.  It’s a time of crisis.  And I feel so inadequate, unable to help.

I did buy a sweater shaver, and that helps me.  I sit during my breaks and defuzz everything in sight, in little round wax-on/wax-off circles.  It’s magic.  It makes my old things and second-hand purchases all clean and new again.  If only life were that easy.

I wish I hadn’t bought water-colors, as it’s too anal-retentive.  I need oils but there’s too many things needed to get started with that.  But oil is forgiving and the inverse of a sweater shaver, leaving marks, artifacts of thought/humanity.  Thoughts you can pick up again and complete later after contemplation.  Much more like writing.

In the mean-time, I have my sweater shaver.

Lately I’ve been feeling very private, which is not conducive for blog writing.  This is in some part due to a man I mistakenly befriended for a minute but have no feelings of romantic connection with reading and contacting me.   It makes me feel euww-ick to know that my struggles fascinate white male readers who want to take care of me, who grasp for connections that don’t exist.  I don’t write this for them.  I write it for my family.  I write it for adoptees.  It’s a monologue.  It’s not a real relationship.

So I just got a letter sent to me from my daughter.  It’s from my PLUS loan that I took out to help my son get through school.  It says I’m about to default.  WHAT? I’ve been faithfully paying on-line this entire time!  Every month!  This is terrible.  I can’t even possibly go back to school if I’ve defaulted with the Federal Education lenders. I go on-line and it says I am current.  What the hell is happening?

And then it dawns on me.  Their left hand doesn’t know what their right hand is doing.  I have two PLUS loans with them, and all this time I thought I was paying both together, I was only paying for one of them.  After signing up to pay on-line, why does the other loan not show up?  Why did they not send me notices prior to being several thousand behind?  As far as I knew, I’d made arrangements to pay PLUS on-line, and that’s what I was doing.  I mean, you’d think if you have an account with a lender and you go to look up your statement, it would all show, right?  Obviously I am an idiot, not knowing how many bills I have, but why would I faithfully pay one and let the other lapse?  I feel like a horse kicked me in the stomach.

This after several days of looking at every possible scenario to get me to art school is falling flat.  Post-bac. programs do not teach any foundation courses and the Grad school  maximum Stafford loan doesn’t even cover the tuition.  Private lenders won’t touch me (we’ve tried with my son – I don’t have the income or assets)  One good thing is I still have enough remaining on my Undergrad maximum Stafford to fund three years of school at a state school, but for tuition only.

I’m okay with going to school knowing I might not be able to complete a BFA, since the degree is less important than the skills.  But I still gotta eat and still gotta sleep somewhere and have enough time to practice those skills.

What was I thinking – I’ve spent my whole life in debt and I can barely live now and I’m soon to have one more loan and taxes due on top of that.  We’re at critical mass.  I need a second job, not more debt. I only wish all this debt was for something I’d wanted.  I only did what I had to do to make the best of things, and not for dreams.  Do we really only get one shot at these things?  I’ll keep trying to figure out how to make this work, but today I’m very sad.

I very well may be stuck here in Korea for several more years.  I just ordered 8 boxes of hair color.   I just want to be me.

Last week Jane said goodbye to me.  I protested that I’d still be here another year, but she’s wise to me.  I am, truly, already gone.  We were both sad.  She’s been such a good friend to me.  I’m torn between loyalty towards her, wondering if I’m copping out, and then this incredible relief to just go for what I want to do, not what I should do.

My days are spent obsessively planning for that blessed day.  I’m already trying to figure out how the heck I can keep some of the nice stuff I’ve acquired and get rid of the rest.

I’ve already identified work for my art school entrance portfolio, and I think I’m already half way there.  So I only have to produce about six or more things.  (This is doable!  As long as I can find a part time job while in school, it is doable!)  But I think I’ll have to try and draw every day until then to get some skill back.  In my little dog-eared notebook I’ve already got enough art pieces written down to fill four gallery shows.  I have each piece in my head, bursting to get out.  I just need to build my skills to execute them.  I know that will take years, and that they will be enjoyable years.  But right now, I must start all over, like learning to speak after a stroke.

I went to Homi Art store in Hongdae towards that end.  I decided to buy watercolors, since that’s pretty much the only wet medium they teach you in Architecture school, and even though I like Oil bar, I can’t afford it at $10 a stick.  Surprisingly, the only foreign brands they sell are lower end but at about double the price, so it’s the Korean brand for me.  Also surprisingly, the Korean brand has a whole optional separate range of colors called Korean colors. I might have to buy these before I leave the country.

I never thought about there being a different color palette here, but just a cursory glance and the tubes were the color of hanbok, embroidery, traditional paintings, and even the food.  I guess the difference is they lie somewhere in-between Western colors:  they tend to be more restrained, subdued colors, natural vegetable dye colors that look somewhat faded. The philosophy behind them is called Korean five colors rainbow.

From a blog (image is a link) they explain:

The Koreans’ old belief that the sky is black and the earth is yellow does not mean that the sky is really black, while the earth is yellow. The black in the sky describes the sky that is limitless, endless and boundless and cannot fathom its abysmal depth, and human consciousness can never grasp its nature. Also, it symbolizes the sky as the object of the ultimate and the fundamental.

The color of the sky is covered with black and red.  She uses gallnut – the closet material to black in the sky from the natural pigment – as a means to express black that is removed from the blue sky.

And the traditional idea of Blue Mountains and Green Waters directly contrasts with the Western notion that recognizes the color of the mountain as green and that of the water as blue. In our traditional minds, the mountain becomes blue as the mountain surface is covered with the blur atmosphere and the water becomes green as its surface is shaded with the trees. In the Western thoughts of colors, the green color in mountains and the blue color in waters are as such in them.

…The white color in the Eastern world is not really white as such. It means the color of the outer boundary. The black color is not merely the blackness. It is the status of chaos before the formation of cosmos that precedes the division of ying and yang.  In the Eastern philosophy, the basic elements that constitute the universe are tree, fire, soil, metal and water, whereas the Western one considers water, fire, soil and air as the basic ones…

Anyway, I thought that was interesting, and I love sharing.

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Turns out I can’t afford to go to school.  Even at a second-tier school in my home state, I still fall short many thousands a year due to my status as a Post-baccalaureate, which disqualifies me from grants and Perkins loans, and even with that I would max out my funding before my third year.  It’s too bad.  I have had so many experiences and am learning how to present questions instead of statements.  I had so many things I wanted to ask/other perceptions to explore, and words are just inadequate.

So, to the moon and back again.

There must be a way.  I will find a way.

Leaving my apartment today to scrounge for food, I found my door meeting resistance as I opened it.  There in the hallway on the floor was a package, and inside was the new book by Eleana Kim, “Adopted Territory.”  And gracing the cover is a Jeanne Modderman’s photo of the art installation, A Collection of One.

 

It’s been out for a little while, but it’s now out in paperback and more affordable to the general public.  So tonight I’m going to curl up with it and do some marathon reading (if that’s even possible since I have trouble reading these days!) of Eleana’s book as well as a 300 page research paper.

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Sorry if I have been absent from posting here – kind of just been processing a lot of things, as well as drafting a paper (and I haven’t written a formal paper in eons) on adoption issues.  Fortunately, I have a professional writer and copy-editor named Jane Jeong Trenka to clean it up and improve it when I get finished!  The problem is I am sorely lacking in reading of source materials…

An example of the abuses that happened in Australia…

Fast approaching will be May when TRACK is hosting Australian birthmoms who have extracted an apology from Western Australia for the unethical taking of their newborns for adoption.  This happened to over 200,000 women there, and is similar to how Korea has dealt with unwed mothers since the 70’s.  Please think about saving some of your pennies for our up-coming fund-raising drive to pay for the conference facilities and lecturers.  (Unlike Holt, we don’t have million dollar advertising budgets…)

We’re developing the campaign donation levels and products you can proudly display right now, so I’ll keep you up to date as they become available and tell you how you can contributions will be handled.

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Thanks to everyone for your kind words of support.  I’ve too much on my plate to respond to everyone individually, but I do appreciate it.

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Less than three weeks and I’ll be back in school.  Then one more year of teaching.  I know my adoptee comrades are sad that I’ve decided to bail earlier, but I’m determined to make the most of my stay here in terms of work for our causes, and I’m sure that these issues will permeate all my work in the future as well.  Having an end date is comforting for me.  Makes being here more bearable.

I don’t know how many times, during my conversations with Holt, that they said “sorry.” But it wasn’t, “We’re deeply sorry and apologize for the grievous impact our past actions have had on your life.”  No.  It was, “sorry, we can’t help you.”

Bullshit.

They were not sorry for dragging me through years of distress during my search.  They were not sorry for attempting to with-hold documents upon request.

The only thing they were sorry about was me exposing them.

(I’m not counting on a formal apology anytime soon, btw.)

Their policies are PROTECTIONIST.  Their policies systematically filter out problematic adoptee cases and frustrate the search efforts of those adoptees during a highly vulnerable time, over an emotionally charged subject, by introducing data piece-meal and dragging out the process.

Had I allowed the Holt process to proceed without question, I never would have known about the existence of girl#4709, and her existence would have been kept to themselves.  Once they realized the existence of girl#4709 was problematic, instead of pulling out all stops to confirm or disprove the possibility there could be a blood relationship, they chose instead to INVALIDATE that question every step of the way.  And so, any avenues to contact girl#4709 were thwarted due to their invalidating that possibility.  They only complied upon pressure of public exposure, and even then they frustrated that search effort by conveniently omitting to pass on to her the evidence which introduced the possibility, denying her informed consent to contact.  They also chose to ignore girl#4709’s positive response to exploring the possibility, introducing once again their process which has frustration designed into it.

This is how my wonderful adoption agency, the adoption agency which delivers the “gold standard” of adoption programs, the one who purportedly only acts in the best interest of the child, really treats their adoptees.

You know, I’ve been very conservative and up until this point today have been reticent to go so far as to say adoption in general is human trafficking, because trafficking connotes slavery and bondage.  But as a subject of the so-called benevolence of their brokering, whose interests were ignored from the very first day and continue to be ignored in such an inhumane manner, I can most definitely say, without any compunction, that adoption as practiced in my lifetime and continuing today (obfuscation and/or obliteration of identities and guarded and selective adoptee records access), can only conclude that this lack of humanity towards adult adoptees indicates that adoption is nothing more than the marketing of humans as objects, as salable goods.

It is clear from both our files that any vital records are entire fabrications.  And my records have visibly been tampered with at a later date.  And yet these fabricated records are the documents upon which they base their justifications of everything which makes us salable. That’s the beauty of identity reassignment, and of being orphans on paper:  without protections for a person’s identity (such as don’t exist in Korea even today) it’s very easy to make every person’s adoption beginning a dead end. By the very nature of identity reassignment, it is ripe for mistakes and abuse and past mistakes and abuse are very unflattering for an industry that does not want to be held accountable for things they should probably be held accountable for, as accountable as any other business or organization – especially when the business is the movement of people.

THIS is why only 2.7% of adoptees succeed in finding their families. Because the records not only document adoptee history, but also document the adoption industry’s process, their power to radically alter lives without oversight, and because finding family shows how social histories have been altered and fabricated.

HOW MANY adoptees had another life?  other family members? were not orphans?  were wrongfully sent abroad?  were actually trafficked?  We will never know, because most adoptees are unaware of how the adoption industry’s process manipulates them, and even if they become aware, we are powerless against protectionist laws that favor industries with lawyers and lobbyists.  And of course, us not knowing is good for the adoption industry, that is how they would like it to stay, and that is why they resist changes to adoption law that comply with United Nations conventions on Rights of the Child to basic issues such as identity. And ethics!…

Never mind the hypocrisy  of Susan Cox (who, btw, shamelessly signed up for my facebook group Korean Adoptees for Fair Records Access) giving Holt credit for helping draft the Hague Convention on adoption ethics and bemoaning how the “convention” wouldn’t have been ratified unless countries (like the United States) weren’t still allowed to adopt from countries who DIDN’T comply…Never mind how that public moral high ground didn’t stop Holt International from taking the low road and CONTINUING TO SOURCE BABIES FROM MANY NON HAGUE CONVENTION COUNTRIES while advertising how they conform to the Hague Convention.  Small point that potential adoptive parents wouldn’t notice…

For the adoptees who weren’t abused and who live the best outcomes, such issues might not concern you as much, but, depending on where in your adoption journey you’ve decided to rest, there may come a day where you change your mind and will desire access to your true histories, so you should be concerned about records access options being open and fair.  All adoptees, even adoption-loving adoptees who support adoption, should question why adoption industry policy does not seek transparency and to rectify any past mistakes or abuses.  If they have nothing to be ashamed of in how they conduct their business today, then they should be 100% forthright TODAY.

But obviously, they’re not.