Jane took me out for dinner Thursday night and we had a seafood feast.  I mean, it was enough to feed four little girls, much less two, and it just kept coming and coming and coming.  Some very yummy items and then there came all the sashimi’s.  One of which was supposedly the penis-shaped thing I filmed, which I couldn’t bring myself to try.  And one of which was live octopus, which I did try.  Jane chose a piece without suckers and put it on my plate, and we poked it and poked it until its nerves decided it didn’t want to move – much – and then I dipped it in soy sauce and oil as instructed, so that it slides down your throat without grabbing on, followed by a shot of soju, also per instruction, to wash it down.  So basically, you don’t really chew or taste the thing and it’s more for the thrill factor.  A long time later we poked the mass of chopped up tentacles, and it seemed to move even more than before:  raw nerves tend to be that way, I guess…

So I was taking the taxi from Gangnam to Dongdaemmon last Friday, and noticed the taxi driver looking at me too much.  “Are you looking for a good time?” he asked.  “No!!!! I laughed/replied nervously.  How I wish I could say yes.  How I wish I weren’t so sensible or thrifty.  He asked me some questions in pretty good English, and I tried to explain that I was adopted, which I’d never attempted before.  Then I tried to explain in Korean.  “ibyungin imnida.”  God, I must have butchered it because I had to say it about half a dozen times with different intonations.  Finally, he got it, and then excitedly started explaining what all the buildings were and all about Seoul as if I’d just arrived from the airport.

Last night I went downstairs for a drink and a smoke and sat down at the plastic chairs and tables which you find outside at most all convenience stores during nice weather.  Next to me was a gaggle of foreign English teachers, half of whom I’d met previously.  None of whom recognized me.  I just sat there, drinking my makoli and smoking my cigarette, and I heard one of the girls ask one of the guys, “What’s that she’s drinking?”

“Makoli” I answered.  “You want to try some?”

“Whoa!  She understood what I said!”  The girl exclaimed to the others.

“Yeah.  I’m a foreigner like yourself.  In fact, I’ve met you all before and see you a lot, but you never remember me.”

So they invited me to their table and a couple recalled meeting me.  We had a nice time and talked about Korea’s poor understanding of democracy and post-dictatorial politics (since two of the guys were married to Korean girls) and also about fashion and how Dongdaemmon’s fabric market was every designer’s wet dream.  We talk about things to do in Pyeongchon, and I complain that there are mostly only bars with nothing interesting going on at them, and the Korean girl Hana tells me there are over 400 bars at this station alone…Anyway, it was a nice time.  But I bet they won’t recognize me next time we’re in the halls together…

Today, after going to the bank to pay my utilities

there is no check-writing here.  Everyone pays from bank to bank account via their ATM’s or on-line.  I attempted to open on-line checking, which required getting a special card and I.D. number from my bank, but I somehow failed due to the really really convoluted on-line open account process.  In the meantime, I have forgotten my pin number, which is mostly because I had to try a dozen before one was acceptable and so it was a number I rarely use and now can’t recall or remember where and if I wrote it down somewhere – what a dork I am

which I have to go directly to the bank to pay, since the apartment’s bank and my bank don’t have a bill paying agreement.  Afterward, I decided to stop and eat my lunch out.

I went to a restaurant that looked as if I could eat solo in, and there saw a seafood salad of sorts on the wall and pointed to it.  The waitress tried to tell me something about the salad and I explained that I was adopted and I couldn’t speak Korean, and it didn’t matter because she could only speak Korean.  She never outright said “anniyo” you can’t have that salad or we won’t make that salad or anything – instead she lectured me about salads.  Saying, “hot” a lot and sucking in her breath like Koreans do, and then pointing me towards some kimchee chiggae instead.  I pointed to the salad, and she lectured me some more about it being hot – don’t know if she meant the weather or the spiciness of the salad, or the soup, or what.   But then she was done with me and gave me a business card and marched me outside and pointed down the street.  I think she was trying to tell me they wouldn’t serve something cold like that on such a hot day, and that I should go somewhere else where they didn’t give a shit about my health.

But I didn’t want hot soup on a hot day.  I continued to walk down the street and hit another restaurant that looked like it might serve a single person.  I pointed to something that looked good on the menu, but of course that was only for multiple people, and I couldn’t tell what was in the other dishes.  So I asked the waitor/owner what was best and ordered what he suggested.  Of course, it ended up being boiling hot soup on a hot day…Afterwards, I was tired and ordered some ku-pi, which is how Koreans spell coffee.  He had no clue what I was talking about.  Finally, he said, “oh!  You mean COFFEE!  And then he went to his coffee dispensing machine and brought me  a cup. At the cash register, I could see he didn’t charge me for the coffee, just to be nice.

Went to my Korean lesson, but we ended up talking about the trashy talk English and European cruisers say and how to respond to that.  I really didn’t care about not learning prepositions – it was fun to help her out:  girl to girl.

It’s kind of nice to be out and about Seoul right now.  Summer fashion is more relaxed, and, despite everyone’s best efforts, the faces are not so white and people look tan and healthy, and if you’re into legs, there are miles and miles of long beautiful legs here.  The girls wear such short skirts that they hold their purses under their butts while walking up stairs.  It’s been nice to not be in school and I am free to have my shoulders uncovered.  In Anyang, I feel like a slut doing this, but in Seoul I am one of many.

All this time I’ve been fretting about the expense of having my comforter cleaned and the impossibility of it fitting into the tiny washing machine at my place.  Today I noticed it had a duvet cover.  Sometimes, sometimes this missing the obvious shit gets so old…

I posted this elsewhere before, but this one has great English subtitles.  There has been a little response to the criticisms in this documentary, such as the quota to make intercountry adoptions equal domestic adoptions, but all the situations in this documentary still occur to this day.

It’s a terrible situation here in Korea, and adoptees are on the front lines pushing the government to DO THE RIGHT THING.  These things are all a no-brainer for everyone abroad and most people in Korea.  Korea still has a lot to learn about transparency and backroom deals and good ol’ boy networks are the order of the day.  One has to ask why these practices continue, and the only explanations I can think of are that rationalizations have become second nature to the perpetrators, and loss of job and profit motivate them to perpetuate these crimes.

Not crimes in the legal sense, but crimes against what should be our inalienable basic human rights as people.

Ahh, another self-portrait.

This time it’s 5:30 a.m., and I’m waiting for the first train of the morning.  I’m reading Jane Jeong Trenka’s new work, “Fugitive Visions,” and it’s disjointed nature perfectly describes adoptedness.  How I felt growing up in the midwest.  How I struggled with all the western world put on me.  How I preemptively reject everyone because I can’t deal with the first rejection.  How I long for love, even though I expect only rejection. How I deal with now.  How every second of every minute I am sort of nowhere, because my head is always flooded with all these complicated clashing noisy distracting frustrating churning thoughts. The therapist would ask, “how do you feel?”  How can one possibly begin to put a finger on all that?  Because every moment is all that, and never just one thing.  We come from a place where we draw the kind of attention nobody wants.  We live in this place as ghosts in society.  We inhabit this space, this interstitial space.

And I look up and see this;  I must dig out my camera and shoot.

You know, it isn’t just about the past or the future or fate or gratitude or luck or anger or depression or hopeness. (the mispelling is an inside joke)  It’s about this photo.  It’s about all these layers.  How many layers?  How many layers…

Somehow, Jane managed to capture those layers, after layers, after layers.  We are each of us sifting through this morass of experiences, trying to organize our books in order to live.  But Jane just says, “see?  this is just how it is for me/us.” She is an excellent writer, but her book is no book:  it is a documentary film about a reluctant exile and finding the soundtrack to describe such an epic journey.  The visions are a deck of cards, shuffled. It is a document of how we think;  how we must think, to just be.

There is no protection from adoptedness.  There is no avoiding it or denying it, try as we might.  Yet our adopters and society insist on this myth of equality, banishing us to a life of silence.  No other diaspora that faces racism would be told the racism they experience doesn’t matter/is cancelled out because they were chosen. But adoptees live this daily.  Neither are we allowed to grieve our losses, because it hurts others, and we are taught that their emotions are more important than ours.  Is it any wonder so many adoptees have sardonic characters?

That would be me I am describing.

I have avoided other adoptees all my life, so it was surprising when I first met them to discover that they, too, had sardonic characters, biting wit, and were always recognizing the irony in everything.

When I first heard about adoptees returning to Korea;  that they met and had a community, I thought how counter-productive for their self actualization.  At that time, I had wanted to believe that with a little hard work, I could just slip right in and reclaim my Koreanness, and that reclaiming Koreanness WAS self actualization.  But Korea won’t let me.  Because my banishment was total, and I will forever be a foreigner here.   The adoptees you meet from all over the world are also lacking Koreanness, despite blending in here.  Adoptedness is the state we all understand, the land we all inhabit.

The truth is, we can never be like others in either society.  The adopting world needs to know that.  The adoptees need to recognize that before they can heal.  The Korean people need to see exactly what exile does to the little people they send away.  And the international adoption agencies need to stop toying with all those populations’ hopes and dreams. Their machine works.  But what of the lives they have affected?  Ask me.  Ask both my moms, wherever they may be.

So I have decided to become a card carrying returning adoptee member and join this community here.  And it is not about belonging to something/anything, out of desperation for company, for I am most comfortable with and accustomed to isolation.  It is about Jane’s pioneering work and vision.  It is about the kind of person I am.  It is about truth and justice.

The adoptees who have chosen to live here are a resilient bunch.  And for those that are activists in adoption reform, they are beyond mere resilience.  They are advocates for others and proactive about improving/resolving not only their own lives, but all the other lives affected by this crazy experiment gone awry.  I am proud, proud, proud to be invited into the fold.

Anyway, read Jane’s book.  Maybe then you can understand.  We’re not just ungrateful malcontents.  We are survivors and freedom fighters.

The first time I saw this movie it kind of floored me:  part experimental film / part documentary, the exploration of forced migration and its relationship to colonization of indigenous peoples takes us from a historical mystery involving Peter Paul Rubens, to Denmark’s Tivoli Garden, to Sweden’s huge Korean adoptee population which outnumbers immigrants, to Minnesota, where the largest population of Korean adoptees is concentrated.  It floored me because a) it’s so European  b) it really nails and exposes a core idea of the motivation of people adopting transnationally and transracially c) it made me really appreciate what the Scandinavian Korean adoptees must experience and d) oh – a whole list of intangible things that is the Korean adoptee experience globally, of which I am one.

Click here to view

It is a quick-time video, so give it some time to load.

and you might want to right click on the link and choose

“open link in new tab”

In fact, it might take an hour, so go make a sandwich and take a nap first.

I was so excited to share this with you, I went to Tobias Hubinette and got his permission to share it here, since it’s hard to locate on his website.  And, I accidentally saw it and the film-maker, Jane  Jin Kaisen, while attending a forum at G.O.A.L. last night.   Jane is in Korea while shooting another experimental documentary exploring  the themes of resistence, feminine oppression, and reversal of power.   She will return to California soon to continue her studies.

I can’t embed their streaming video, but here’s the link to Deann Borshay’s compilation of post Korean War footage of Korean children, justaposed against an instruction manual for how to care for your newly adopted Korean children, circa 1961

Sara and I saw this at the exhibit at the Wing Luke Asian Art Museum downtown Seattle, and it was stunning, in the literal sense, to watch.  There is little I can say about the  cultural insensitivity and racism of the people saving us.  I cry inside thinking how the same things are being done to children all over the world, whose new adoptive parents really have NO CLUE what the child came from and what the child goes through to assimilate.

In a word:

beautiful

Many Americans can not fathom how many adoptees there are in Europe.  But here in Seoul I meet the ones who have returned, and I must say, they are distinctly European in their outlook and the way in which they have handled (or not) the burden of being raised in distinct mono-cultures.

We just got word of this animated film and look forward to its completion and eventual release.

Here’s the write-up from Imprint TALK:  Fresh Asian Pop Culture

Approved for Adoption, a hybrid animated/documentary, is being hailed as the Korean Persepolis.  Persepolis was an Oscar nominated film in 2007 that used animation to tell the story of the narrators memories of childhood and adolescence.  Approved for Adoption uses a similar technique where the main subject matter of the film, Belgian-Korean comic book artist Jung, goes back to Korea for the first time since he was orphaned.  The animated sequences will help illustrate the memories of his childhood growing up with his adoptive parents in Belgium.  The film is directed by French filmmaker Laurent Boileau.  No word yet on an official US release date.

This is a pretty unique perspective on the whole Korean adoptee story because of the European setting.  There are, of course, many similar stories that have been told from Korean-Americans who were adopted at a very young age.  Here’s hoping that it will get a chance to play in the United States in the near future.

Here’s the official blogsite for the film.  It’s in French only though: http://approved-for-adoption.blogspot.com/