If the one person in America who fits the data for Kim Sook Ja is the correct person, then Kim Sook Ja is a single mother.   She cuts hair for a living and has a 20 yr. old son.  They live in a conservative area of Washington State, plagued by the problem of nuclear waste.  They have almost zero internet presence, except someone related about 32.  The matching person me and my adoptee friends mistakenly thought might be the father (same first names, different middle initials) is probably a much older brother.  Probably Caucasian.  Like me, she is a second family.  Unlike her, I am a beauty-school drop-out, though I did end up being a single mom.

On the way home I didn’t think I’d make it to eating time at a Migook’s BBQ in Seoul, so I stopped at a different restaurant I saw on my walk home last time.  Only the thing, the picture in the window, that I pointed to with my parasol must not have been available.  Only I didn’t hear the ubiquitous “obpsoyo” that one always hears when something is not possible.  Instead, four ajummas all sat down to a dinner of cold noodles and laughed.

Oh fuck.  The doorbell is ringing for the first time and I can’t speak Korean.  three rings.  I’m not going to answer it.  I’m in no mental state for yet another miscommunication.

So I type into my cell-phone translator “anything” and they freak out because they can’t comprehend how whatever that word is in Korean has anything to do with the menu.  And in frustration and just the aftermath of having a bad day I go to their refrigerator and pull out a bottle of makkolli and start to drink it.  They get me some side dishes and then sit down and eat their meal, and it’s clear I will go hungry and they think I am just drinking my dinner.

Some students from school walk by and I grab them to help me.  Only they can’t comprehend what my problem is either.  I call the BBB translation service but at the same time they are, it turns out, calling my co-teacher.  In classic fashion, the translation service rings at the same time the co-teacher answers and the students take my phone and hang up on the translation service.

I explain how I’m just having a nervous breakdown and that at this point I’ll eat anything on the menu and the co-teacher asks what food they have and I suffer through them listing everything to her.  So she orders like the most expensive thing on the menu, a meal for two, and I just accept it.  By this time I am sobbing and the students don’t know what to think and the ajumma is patting me on the back and showing me how they hold their sleeve out of the way while she pours makkolli.

Other customers come in while I am talking on the phone and sobbing my story to the party giver that I’m supposed to go see in Seoul, and I try to eat while I’m putting pressure on all my sinus areas so I don’t look like a swollen monster. I’m using the finger towel to sop up my snot.  Gross in any culture.  I only eat one portion and slowly polish off my bottle of makkolli.  I want to throw down a buck and bum a cigarette from the other customers, but I know I can’t.  Instead, I just put on my sunglasses while they all discuss what is wrong with the teacher sitting over there by herself drinking makkolli.

I go to the bathroom, and it is an isosoles triangle.  Thank God the door opens out.  I accidentally drop the toilet paper in the pit toilet and there is a dry spot and I fish it out.  There is no flush handle and only a bucket and pail.  I fill the pail but it isn’t enough to flush.  There is no mirror in the smallest bathroom in Korea, so I just put my glasses back on and pay to leave.

I’m sure they wonder how unhinged the foreign teacher is.  I don’t know if they have any sympathy or not.  I hope they think my total loss of all composure is not about the food order, but about living in Korea.  I never get the appropriate opportunity to explain that I am Ibyung-a.

I get home and head straight to the veranda for that smoke.  At the daycare there is a worker, painting the  gutters with tar, looking up at this woman who dares to smoke half in public.  There is no downspout on the gutter.  There is no downspout on the gutter.

Every Korean I’ve met, no matter what their English level, seems to know the words “stress,” “burden,” and , ”  ”  (the makkolli is affecting my memory)  They hear that I am ibyung and instantly get a look of pity on their faces, which is clearly and immediately REPLACED with a look of, “Oh YEAH?”  You think you’ve got it hard?  Try living here and being Korean!”  And then I get this palpable feeling of envy and resentment that I was raised in the land of daytraders and MTV and Bill Gates. I am a whiney spoiled brat who should be grateful, no matter what continent I am on.

I am a solitary, totally isolated ghost no matter what continent I am on.

Maybe Kim Sook Ja is smart to just live her life in the shadow of the nuclear wasteland.  Maybe I am jousting at windmills.  Maybe I should just go home.

This photo is all I have.  This stolen photo that I’m not supposed to have.  Because if I’d asked for it, they wouldn’t have given it to me.  It only exists by accident.  They only showed it to me because I had a film crew with me and they so badly wanted to disprove my assertion that the girl might be a TWIN…and then balked when I proposed we could still be sisters.  How many similar photos are kept out of reach of other adoptees?  How many severed relationships are kept across the room from each other in the Holt archives?

And they said they have nothing to hide…it’s more that they are afraid of what we will find.

Two girls abandoned on the same day, in the same location, probably at the same time, and recorded on a document usually only reserved for one.  Two girls with consecutive orphan numbers sent to the same orphanage handled by the same adoption agency. Our birthdays written on our chests the day we were photo cataloged at intake is  exactly 6 months 6 days apart.

(gee, for those into numbers, isn’t is curious how it goes 3-3 6-6 9-9?)

Sounds like sheer mass production laziness to me…

And CLEARLY, me on the left is 6 months OLDER than the girl on the right, RIGHT?  Making it impossible for one woman to have given birth to both of us?  Never mind that the girl on the right would have had to have been born already able to walk and talk…Never mind that there’s no way I am 3 years old in that photo.

We couldn’t possibly be siblings because the man who gave us fake names gave is DIFFERENT fake family names, RIGHT?

And is it just a coincidence they both have Sook in their given names?

And look at those noses, those mouths.  Radically different, right?

For the love of God, Why didn’t Holt call up that girl and say, “excuse me, but it is possible a terrible travesty has occurred and we need to check – if not for your sake then at least for the sake of the other girl?”

The people at HOLT only care about themselves.  This is no humanitarian organization.  They are monsters.

Today I’m cranky and tired.  Yesterday I was sitting in the cafeteria and all the teachers were laughing and joking about something they don’t bother to translate or include me in as  always and I just stared off into space like I always have to.  Most days this communication gap is just something I weather.  But some days, especially when I’m tired, well — it gets to me.  Occasionally there will be an attempt at a conversation, but they always dead-end.  So they give up.  And I give up.  And the other foreigners here in this town, I have no idea what they’re doing and vice-versa, and why should them being foreign also make them more lovable to me?  Answer:  it doesn’t.  And they have each other – they don’t need a third wheel.  I wouldn’t know what to do if I had the opportunity to have a conversation anyway.  My tongue is just this phantom appendage in my mouth.

Yesterday also, on top of a little side job that’s a major pain in the arse effectively ruining every evening during prime time and keeping me awake later than I want, I also compiled all the photos of the installation and got about halfway through making them web-ready.  Tedius.  The reward for a lot of work is more work, because nobody else is going to promote it but yourself.

And I haven’t heard back from the boy after his two years late untimely return email and I continue to be the biggest old fool on the planet.

And then I ran across mention of Kim Sook Ja while posting about the art installation and I found another address for her and that she has a cosmetology license…Now I have to gather the resolve to send that off again.  I’m not even sure I’m the same person who wrote that last year.  Sometimes it feels like finding any family is just a masochistic exercise in asking to be beaten bloody with more rejection.

And then a Korean sent me this poem as a gift yesterday, not thinking:

Do you have this person in your life?

By Ham Sok Hon /Translated by Ann Isaac and Sung-soo Kim

Before you leave for a long journey

Without any worry

Can you ask this person

To look after your family?

Even when you are cast out from the whole world

And are in deepest sorrow

Do you have someone

Who will welcome you warmly and freely?

In the dire moment when your vessel has sunk

Is there someone

Who will give you their life belt and say

“You must live before me”?

At the execution ground

Is there someone

Who will exclaim for you

“Let him live, even if you kill the rest of us”?

In the last moment of your life

When you think of this person

Can you leave this world smiling broadly

And feeling at peace?

Even if the entire world is against you

When you think of this person

Can you stand alone for what you believe?

Do you have this person in your life?

No.

I do not have this person in my life.

Revisiting Im Kwon-Taek’s masterpiece Sapyongje this morning, I read the following write-up on wikipedia:

Dong-ho in his 30s recalls his past as listening to a measure of pansori sung by the jumak’s owner.^[3] He and his sister were raised by the pansori singer Yu-bong, who is very cruel to them and even blinds the sister. Apparently (and this is confirmed in a 2000 interview with the film’s director^[4]) this is done to make them better pansori singers. Since pansori is like American blues music, Yu-bong feels that a truly great pansori artist must suffer.) Eventually the boy runs away but the girl stays on.^[5] Some critics have stated that this movie glorifies the father’s patriarchial power as he seeks to limit his daughter’s transgressive sexuality.^[6] But most believe that the girl symbolizes South Korea, transcending a history of suffering to achieve greatness.^[7]

By jumping to citation 7, I gleaned the following:

Many Koreans commented on how the film represented the purest portrayal of Han they had yet to see on screen. Han…is a concept ever elusive to non-Korean viewers. To quote Chungmoo Choi, Han basically entails “the sentiment that one develops when one cannot or is not allowed to express feelings of oppression, alienation, or exploitation because one is trapped in an unequal power relationship.”

…Im continues his trope of utilizing a woman character as metaphor for the torturous history of South Korea.

I just found it interesting that the girl symbolizing Korea and “transcending a history of suffering to achieve greatness” is pictured at the end, lead in her blindness and wisdom by her bastard offspring.

Korea, may the fruits of your passions be regarded half as thoughtfully as you head into the unknown future.

I always follow goat trails, taking the same path, the one of least resistance.  Same holds true in Korea.  I take the train because the ride is beautiful and comfortable.  Privileged me, I don’t care that it costs a thousand won more or that it doesn’t leave as often.  I’m a creature of comfort.  I always got off one stop before the terminal station because it was more convenient (or so I thought) to the subway line I typically (also a goat trail) take to get to TRACK meetings.

However, one time going to meet Jane to scout for art installation hardware, I calculated that the terminal station would be a better choice.  Terminal stations are nice because one doesn’t have to set ones phone alarm and/or risk missing your stop.  So I slept like a baby and woke up to this:

Close your eyes and imagine waking up to this.  It’s just the most peaceful experience.  You walk off of the train and the crush of people doesn’t bother you at all.  Lovely.

Now, whenever I can, I always take the train to its terminal station to sleep like a baby and gently wake up.

(thanks for the link, Joyce!  I chose another one because the other sped up and was missing the last note)

Added note:  Hey Jude is not part of the Korail terminal train experience.

btw,