Here are my video comments and updates on the documentary:

Whew!  Glad THAT’s over with!  I can’t count the number of takes I had to do before it said something even close to what I wanted to say.  And my hard drive is almost fulll and kept crashing, and it’s been hotter than hell and I kept having to shut down and put my computer in the refrigerator to continue…

But I hope it helps.  I mean to humanize us adoptees.  We are NOT just whiners.  We have legitimate grievances with these people who brokered our adoptions.  A lot of shady stuff goes into the creation of orphans, EVEN BY THE MOST REPUTABLE ADOPTION AGENCY IN THE WORLD.

Now I must clean up the instructional power point video – Man, adoption reform work is like a second job!

Finally!  After over a week of insane transcribing, translating, proof-reading and turning into subtitles, as well as an epic mad dash to the last second and unsuccessfully getting the finished product in time for our presentation, (where Jane had to do a voice-over in real-time for the ENTIRE episode)  and another three days of file-sharing technical difficulties – here is the SBS documentary (no chance to proof read the subtitles) on adoption agency records access, featuring yours truly…

Go TRACK!!!

Despite a few places where there’s been a heavy hand on my story…I just really really really appreciate all SBS has done for my case, and for exposing some of the serious problems regarding the control of records.  They were amazing to me, did an amazing amount of research, and truly investigated what the central issues are concerning adoption law and conflict of interests.

Those core issues are:

• The adoption agencies are the ONLY ones who have access to adoption records – this excludes even the government.
• Nobody but the government has any power to monitor adoption agency activities.  Their power is limited and they don’t exercise it.
• KCAR, the new central organization created to assist with identity retrieval, is a private organization with no governmental power, relying only on adoption agency cooperation.  KCAR has no original documents and no access to them.
• Even today, children with living parents’ identities and social histories are fabricated in order to make them available for adoption.  Their original identities are never recorded with the government, and only the adoption agencies hold this information.
• Adoption agencies know their presence replaces social services and feel entitled to funding from the government.  (but they don’t want government oversight or government access to documents)

Given the above issues, is it any wonder so many adoptees and first parents are unsuccessful finding the truth?

From the bottom of my heart, for me and for ALL ADOPTEES who only seek the most basic information about their identity,  which should be every person’s unalienable civil right, I thank SBS’s We Want to Know That director, Kim Ji Eun, and all of her tireless dedicated staff.

Thank you also to TRACK, who brave many slings and arrows asking Korea – and the world – to stop looking away.  Only through recognition of the ugly truth and reconciliation through correction, of the causes and mechanisms of its creation, can Korea begin to replace their shame with pride.

It’s nearing the end of changma, Korea’s monsoon season, and the trees are alive with an electronic buzz that sounds like a cacophany of small power tools (grinders, transformers, the arcing of a broken power line, the far-off sound of jack-hammers) at a construction site, followed by the sound of a million cicadas.

It’s the deafening mating call of some insect.  The males scream their overtures to the females, mate, and then die.

I read somewhere once that in India, more babies are born nine months after monsoon season than any other time of the year.  I wonder if that is true in Korea, too.  Everything is green and lush, everyone is trapped inside when it rains, and everyone can sense in their bones that the oppressive heat of summer will soon kick in and it will be impossible to stand the touch of another person/furnace.  I wonder if love in Korea is seasonal:  annual or perrennial.  I wonder if there is love here or if mating is merely a social construct born of survival.

I wonder what next season will bring.  I wonder what my new mate looks like in monk attire.  I wonder if this thing we have is due to the end of changma; whether I should save him from an ascetic life, or whether an ascetic life can save him from me.

I missed my son’s birthday. For the second year in a row.

What kind of a self-absorbed asshole have I become?

Something about putting your identity issues on the back burner for over four decades which can not sustainably be denied creates a pressure that, when it does surface, is suddenly the most prominent thing on your screen.  It’s like that car where your speed is projected onto your window so, though transparent, no matter what you’re looking at, you must always look through the projection.

abandoned – adopted

It’s foremost in every thing and every thought and you can’t erase it.

I’m sorry, David.  I love you.

Oh God, blogging is so painful sometimes.  But this is a fucking real-time document of a life in shambles and picking up the pieces. So here are tears for your camera now, so where are you and why aren’t you shooting?

You know, it’s not just me that’s affected by this, it’s my children too.  They had to live with a woman who preemptively rejected social interaction, who disdained celebrations, who discounted holidays, who rarely laughed or smiled, who had no joy, and could share nothing of herself with them because she couldn’t even share it with herself.

They had to live a life always on the move, unstable, as their mom spun her wheels searching in vain for something fulfilling to do/become.  They had to live a life divorced from extended family and normalcy.  They had to explore race and ethnicity on their own because their mother wouldn’t and couldn’t help them.  They had to travel from her island to the world and back again every day as they were growing up.

I always swore I’d never visit upon my children any of the crimes committed against me.  But we create new crimes in that vacuum.  And we all know that as we age we become more infantile.  Yet the person who breaks down does it prematurely.  And my children have had to raise me and take care of me the past two years.

The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the sons the scripture goes…There is this Korean blood thing, this lineage thing, this heritage thing.  And this han thing, this tragedy thing, this fate thing.  How do you stop this ripple.  How do you stop it.

I must stop it.

So today I got in the elevator again with a foreigner I’ve talked to THREE times on friendly terms, and he didn’t recognize me.  Fuck it.  He has  a mullet anyway…

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.