Spicy ramen

Over the past month or so, I’ve been making a concentrated effort to lead a healthier lifestyle. I’ve been working out regularly, cooking balanced meals and even taking a multivitamin. It feels good to know I’m actively pursuing my own wellness. I’ve noticed a difference in my overall mood and the positive feelings are motivation enough to stay disciplined. However, I’m only human and there’s one craving that I don’t think I will ever be able to shake for the life of me. As the title of this post would suggest, I’m talking about a tasty little snack called spicy ramen. Cheap and chock-full of MSG. Yum.

You might assume I developed this affair in college seeing as ramen is a poor undergrad staple, but no. If anything, college actually turned me off to ramen, particularly the chicken and beef Cup Noodles which I now feel nauseated by. I won’t eat any kind of ramen anymore except for the spicy variety. On rainy days I especially crave it, more than soup or a hot cup of tea. I just want a bowl of those fiery noodles with my name on it.

My body has a number of sensory memories stored in it, but the one associated with spicy ramen is maybe the strongest I have so far in my 25 years of life. It takes me back to Buan, my birthplace. In my entire life, I have spent less than 24 hours there. I was born in the evening and shuttled straight to Seoul, my omma relinquishing me immediately. It wasn’t until this past June that I finally went back to see the city for myself. A cheerful young guide accompanied me on a three hour bus ride and it was cloudy when we arrived. We only spent around four hours there and didn’t do anything too extravagant. It is not an extravagant place to be honest, but it was my entry point into the world. An imperative piece of my life. To simply be there with all my senses snapped on was enough. There was no joy or even deep sorrow for that matter, but some amorphous mix of emotion that I still fail to find a name for. I had initially hoped to purchase an item there to remind me of the experience, but as we passed stores on the street, the notion began to feel cheap. No single item could ever capture what it felt like to be there.

So, the souvenir I ended up bringing back with me is a love for spicy ramen. We missed our intended bus back to Seoul and ended up having a hurried lunch before catching the next available trip. By then the cloudy sky had burst with heavy rain, so we ducked into this small restaurant where a woman made us fresh kimbap and brought us large bowls of spicy ramen. I had never had spicy ramen before and my mouth was on fire after a few bites, but we didn’t have time to eat it slowly, so I kept shoving it into my mouth even as my nose started running. We were sitting at a wooden bar and I had my wet umbrella balanced between my knees. I realized that my time in Buan would be ending very soon and the only thing I had left to do there was eat well, so I did. When we were finished, we literally ran to the bus station and climbed onto the heavily air-conditioned bus all soggy and shivering. And just like that, Buan became a known part of my past.

I hope that I can go back again one day. Maybe stay for a more extended period and get to know the place better. Talk to people (or at least try to). I couldn’t resist the temptation to carefully observe the people, especially those who might look to be near my omma or appa’s ages. Maybe I could walk into a shop and the owner would exclaim my striking resemblance to someone they know. If only, right? For now, I am settling for a bowl of spicy ramen on a rainy day because it brings me back to Buan. I eat it quickly, too, even if I have the time to go slow. I set my mouth on fire because I don’t want to forget what it feels like. What I felt like finally back in the context of where everything began.

An American in Seoul

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m only about two weeks away from departing for Korea! I know I haven’t really discussed this on the blog in many months. Too many things have been on my mind, but right now I am absolutely focused on my trip. After much debate, I chose to do an adult adoptee tour which will be for ten days. Coming to that decision was incredibly difficult for me and I may have to dedicate a different post to this later. I felt very conflicted for a while which is another reason why I failed to blog anything about it. At this moment, however, I am mostly excited to be going and busying myself trying to prepare.

I’m preparing in some pretty standard ways, like finding travel-sized containers for toiletries and getting a converter plug, but the biggest thing for me has been preparing to adapt to Korea. There is so much I don’t know. I am a foreigner to my birth culture. However, I won’t look like a foreigner in Korea at all. My mentee even told me that I am the average height of a Korean woman. People will expect me to be like them when I’m just not in so many ways. It’s already happened to me multiple times in the US, so in Korea I can only imagine it will happen tenfold. And Korea really does have such a homogenous population. How can I blame them for assuming? To come across an ibyang (Korean word for adoptee) is probably not a typical experience.

So, really, preparation for me has been about learning to be ‘more Korean’. I’m not going to lie: a big part of me wants to fit in. Maybe that is a juvenile thing to say, but it’s honestly how I feel. I do not want to be stumbling through every day in Korea as this glaringly American foreigner having no idea about language or cultural norms, especially when I am Korean myself! I’ve been cramming Korean language lessons into my head, learning about manners and even put my ears on a strict diet of Korean music only. If this sounds a little ridiculous, it probably is. I kind of feel like this is middle school all over again when I had to have gel pens, wear flared jeans and watch South Park just so I could discuss it with other kids at school.

The thing is, TV shows and fashion are just trends that fade away, but Korea will always be a part of me. Maybe all this determination to learn about the culture is a phase. Or maybe it’s something more than that. Maybe it’s a path leading to a better sense of who I am. Some KADs seem so confident and grounded in their sense of self while others seem to be in a perpetual identity crisis. I’m….somewhere in that fray. Learning Korean is getting a little frustrating, but I have always loved learning languages. And k-pop over the past year has slowly made its way into my regular music rotation. There is definitely a pleasure that comes from having these pieces of Korea in my life. I don’t pursue these things solely out of obligation, but because they bring an extra level of joy to my life. They might not necessarily make me ‘more Korean’, though, whatever that even means. And, at the end of the day, what’s wrong with me being American? I am American and that’s not something I can simply erase when I arrive in Seoul. Like Korea, America will always be a part of me, too. It’s always been my dominant culture and, while it’s certainly not perfect, there are things about being American that I love.

I am a Korean American adoptee. It’s only taken me up to this point to really stand back, look at each word and think ‘what the heck does that mean, anyway?’. I have a feeling it’s a question I will spend my whole life answering.

Reality

This search and reunion stuff is becoming increasingly hard for me to get a grasp on. I still intend to go back to Korea this summer, but now I’m thinking of putting off my birth family search, especially because I will travel without family or friends. The odds are not entirely predictable. It could be that my relatives are never found. Or it could be that they are which could make meeting one or some of them this summer a full-blown reality. And that scares me! How peculiar that must sound..that I’m intimidated by the idea of meeting someone who looks like me and shares my blood. But there you have it. Of the many possibilities, am I ready in the case that this one comes true? I’ve always felt more prepared for the possibility of never reuniting with birth family. They’ve never really been a tangible part of my life. Living without them is the only way I have known how to live. But I also know that a person can miss what they never had. Feeling like an outsider to my birth culture most of my life paired with the sudden death of my dad as an infant make me no stranger to ambiguous loss. You do not have to thoroughly know something or someone to long for their presence in your life. If I never at least try to search for birth family, I know I will regret it. Maybe for me the search process, regardless of outcome, is about closure. About knowing that I did everything I could.

I just don’t know if I can do it right now. Part of me thinks, well, if there is reunion and we maintain contact, wouldn’t I want to have as much time as possible knowing them? Being a part of their lives and me a part of theirs? I don’t think I could face meeting any birth family this summer by myself. The experience would be nothing short of surreal. Can a person even prepare for it? I cannot begin to fathom standing in the same room with my omma, studying her face, hearing her voice, embracing her.. It doesn’t seem real, but it could be. It’s something so completely powerful and beyond words. Something that would change me forever. I don’t feel ready to put myself through those emotions..or at the very least I cannot imagine doing it alone. If I ever go to Korea and meet my birth family, I don’t want to be alone. After that experience, I would want to be talked to and held by someone who loves me. Maybe that’s just me. I even sense myself feeling emotional as I write this. I don’t think I would be able to experience a reunion without the company of someone I know intimately with whom I can process and cry. At this point in time, any people I would wish to accompany me this summer cannot do so. I don’t want to do this by myself. The reality of it all is heavier on me than I thought it would be and I have not even officially initiated my search! It’s possible that even if I started the search now, no one would be found by time I travel to Korea, but there’s still that small chance, isn’t there? Maybe the best thing I can do for me right now is wait. And keep breathing.

Race in the workplace

Oh boy. I had a very interesting experience at my internship last week. It makes me wonder what is really going through other peoples’ minds when they first meet me. I won’t go into details about the setting for privacy’s sake, but I was confronted by a client twice regarding my race. The conversations went something like this:

“Well, you know how to make stir-fried rice, don’t you?”
“Oh, I’ve never actually made it before.” (True story.)
“What? Oh girl, I KNOW you know how to make fried rice.”

And..

“Hey, what’s your last name?”
“[insert my dad’s very English surname].”
“Get outta here. Really?”
“Yeah. You seem surprised.”
“Yeah, well, I was expecting something like Chaw, Chang, Ching or whatever.”

I wasn’t completely blindsided by what happened, but I wasn’t expecting it, either. The experience really made me think again about how others view me. Most of my life I essentially felt like a white girl trapped in an Asian girl’s body. To be frank, it’s kind of like wearing a really padded bra: false advertising. What you see is not what you get. The vast majority of people that I meet never question my name or any other characteristics about me that might not ‘add up’. However, their silence does not necessarily mean they’re not wondering. And I honestly don’t care if people wonder. Wonder away! I really don’t even care if people want to be direct and ask me about my background. I could say, “None of your business” to inquirers, but this is who I am and I feel no need to hide it. If you don't know that children have been and continue to be adopted by families of a different race than them, well, time to start learning!

The workplace is a different story. In my professional work, there is no reason for clients to know the details of me being transracially adopted. I will only share personal information if I judge it to be beneficial for the client. In this most recent encounter, there was no perceived benefit and, really, the client was just trying to get a rise out of me. I can’t say that it worked. I wasn’t upset or hurt at all, actually. More than anything, I was surprised. One thing that can be said about my profession (social work) is that I need to expect the unexpected. This will not be the last of my experiences like this at work or otherwise. As a transracial adoptee, I cannot take for granted what I bring into the room and how I present when I am with new people. I can talk, act, dress, live my life in any number of ways that I want, but through it all I will always have my Asian features and that is one of the first things if not the first thing people will notice about me. What they think from there is anyone’s guess.

Drop in the ocean

It’s a humbling experience, pulling back that lens you see the world through to view your life as one piece in a huge, ever-changing system of people and beliefs. Sometimes it’s so easy to get caught up in what you see up close. For most of my life, I have viewed my adoption in this way. I belonged to an adoption group and had a few adoptee friends in my childhood, so I knew I wasn’t alone, but still. I am the only Asian in my white family as well as an only child. I was one of maybe four total Asian kids at a high school of 1200. Growing up in the United States, I was raised under westernized ideals, which I interpret as putting high value on individuality and independence. Basically, I grew up feeling pretty darn unique. I was quite convinced that few people, if any at all, could truly understand me. Even now, there are still times when I curl into that self-absorbed, misunderstood ball. It’s certainly not something I’m proud of, but I try to face it.

In starting this blog, I have come to discover the incredible amount of adoptee voice and resources out there. Holy cow! The scholarly literature, memoirs, poetry, organizations, conferences.. I’ve been so isolated from all of it. Entering this adoption blogosphere has been overwhelming. Going from feeling alone to feeling like one of thousands is incredibly humbling. I can scarcely take it all in. There are so many smart, sincere and eloquent people getting their thoughts out there. Some have been blogging for years. Some stopped blogging years ago, but I still find myself entranced by their dust-covered words. All these amazing contributions make me want to re-assess why I’m here and why I’m doing this. In this sea of voices, what can I offer? I feel like I’ve entered a party unforgivably late. I want to be here, though, and I’m already learning so much. The adoption community is bigger and more present than I ever realized. I hope that I can start feeling like a part of it again.