I've had a very fortunate growing-up

When I see a Vietnam vet, he doesn't do anything to me.

When I see a Korean War vet, he tells me how dedicated "my people" were with a big smile.

I had Asian friends (friends of all colors) throughout school.

Oddly, most of the typical "Chinese eyes!" remarks came from other minorities.

I don't ever remember being discriminated against by whites.

When people ask, "where are you from?", DC is an answer that receives no further probing.

Only once has a Korean addressed me in Korean, then he immediately switched to English when I gave him a blank stare, and made nothing of it.

Adult Asians I've had contact with do not fuss over my adoptedness.

Friends in school never said anything about my adoptedness - it was as if it didn't even exist.

There are only a handful of race/identity things I remember from before college days, which I'll probably share sooner or later.

I think the depressing thing about this is when I read memoirs and stuff, I feel disconnected from them. It's a very selfish thing to say, that in a way I'm ashamed of my privilege. I can connect to adoptees in the most general sense...but I really haven't endured a lot of the hardships I read about. This is hugely biased though - I don't read much about the adoptees whose experiences match mine....ah, the publishing industry...

right around now...

...my ulra-pragmatic, real world, conservative republican semi-childhood says: who gives a shit about adoption? It's just intense navel gazing.

Perhaps that side of me needs suppression...

well speak of the devil...

I was randomly selected for a general college life type survey.

Two consecutive questions were "was your mother born in the USA?" and "was your father born in the USA?" Oh why oh why did I just know that the next question would not be "and were you born in the USA as well?"

The things even surveys take for granted...

taekwondo

Took it (maybe in kindergarden?) 'cause I wanted to be a power ranger. haha

actually, the Power Rangers was originally a Japanese show...

clans, lineage, extrapolation, etc.

My Korean birth name is Shin 신. My record doesn't give the Chinese character though, so I can't be sure which clan I come from (申,辛,愼). Apparently I was born in Kyonggi-do, though, which may be of geographical significance. Wiki implies that Shin is an fairly common family name with nearly a million people identifying as such in 2000. Only a few family names reach the million mark; Kang, Kim, Park, Lee, Chung, Cho, Choi. Yoon and Shin are the only 900k ones. I'm actually surprised that there's no Hanji in my record. Shouldn't you use Hanji for official stuff? I don't know if I mentioned it here already, but they tried to white-out my parents names, though I can easily see my mother's name is Jeong Sook. Dunno about the father's name though. The white-out is thicker over his name.

The record also states my mother has two sisters and one brother, so I'd have aunts and an uncle to complicate things, though that's interesting in itself. Cousins? It says my mother's parents had a "commercial business". My mother was 18 when she had me. If my grandmother was 20 when she had my mother, she would be 58 now. My mother is 38. I'll say my grandmother is +- 5 years, so 63 still isn't that old. I'd say there's an 80% she's alive, since she had a "commercial business", which might imply middle class and access to medical service. I'd say this "commercial business" would be an invaluable clue if I were to search. If I get better at reading Korean I could easily access some kind of business documents from the 80's: how many businesses run by Shins in Kyonggi-do do you think there are - Shin is 1.0% of the family name population? [however, the problem, I said, was that I don't know which specific Shin clan I belong to...but I wonder if that even matters?]



[luckily the consonant S in Korean is the same kanji for "people" in Japanese (hito/jin, 人) so it's easy to remember]

The record says my mother was admitted to Esther's temporary home for unmarried pregnant women in the Eastern Child welfare center, which I also assume must have cost a lot - I'm guessing this only since abandoned children probably had mothers who didn't have enough money to live in a care center before birth.

My first legal guardian was Dr. Kim Do-Young - he also gave me my given name. Was he your legal guardian?

I'm pretty sure I'll go to Korea. Maybe when I graduate around May 2011, only on the condition that I obtain some level of confidence in the language. But damn is Korean hard...

name change

I'll probably do it later on, that is, change my last name back to my Korean birth name. My western name isn't common, no one knows how to pronounce it, and in general it's just annoying. But I wouldn't do it while my parents are alive, probably. I guess I'd feel insulting to them or something...I dunno.

appearances

I only recently found out what the hell a double eye-lid was. It was from some adoption book, may have been Trenka's, or this novel, called "Somebody's Daughter" by Marie Myung-Ok Lee. It was a significant discovery because I vividly remember in high school some people were sitting around, discussing Asian eyes and whatnot, and this Latino guy with distinctly European features comes up to me and was like "well, yours aren't bad." Like Trenka, double eyelids are my mothers genetic gift to me...if it's a "gift" you'll call it. If single eyelids would have resulted in more teasing, then I'm glad I have doubles.

OK, but on to what I just discovered now. There's these things called circle contact lenses:



......ok that's just creepy.

LaTex

I recently just heard about this...marvelous ancient technology...from another blog run by someone crazier than me. Well, I'm still an undergrad, so that's not saying a lot.

LaTex seems great. The syntax probably isn't hard to grasp and seems much simpler than Word...I hate Word, especially for Macs. My foray into open source goodness came from a resentment towards Windows and Lilypond, which I still use sort of frequently for various music projects. Lilypond gets rather confusing though and has a lot of annoying "limitations" that can only be overridden with the most ingratiating of syntax.

When was it...

...that I started to find Asian women attractive? [Feminists, put down your pitchforks and torches...] Ever since I can remember - through my K-12 education - I was never attracted to Asian women. Maybe I was even scared of them...although I had many male Asian friends. Perhaps my memory has blotted out any attractiveness I did see?

But then this past winter I began to read more about adoption. I think Jane Trenka's first memoir was my gateway book into the entire discourse on adoption. Not coincidentally Asian women became attractive. Well, my school does have a very large (11% or so) international student population, many from Japan, South Korea and China. And, again, not coincidentally, this was around the time where the fact actually "dawned" on me that I had a birth mother. I guess I "knew" it all along, but I never really engaged with the reality of the statement.

Attractiveness, adoptedness, birth mothers...in other words...I've never seen a more Freudian thing in my life.

an insensitive pun

If you're an adoptee, well, you may be able to meet your birth parents, but you cannot return to the past. Adoption is, well, there's no use crying over adoption just as there's no use crying over spilled milk.

always get two cats

Do you have a pet? I've had several cats through my youth. The one I have now my family got right when it was born. It was a large cat family...maybe 7+ kittens. But we adopted only one. She was de-clawed and went through all standard house-cat-ification processes. But, ten years later, the cat is really fucked up. She is terrified of outside, terrified of other cats (we never socialized her), and has very strange habits. She'll start sucking on my t-shirts, maybe since it never had a real mother. My parents say (I'm at college, cat-less ;_;) she howls at night looking for me.

I guess the point is...does this sound remotely familiar?

edit - I found this paragraph after searching "socializing cats" in google:

Getting a new kitten or cat is exciting. Whether you have one already and are getting an addition to the family, or whether you getting one for the first time, socializing your new furry friend should be right at the top of your agenda. You know, next to the litter box training? It's too bad that a lot of people don't think of socialization as being an important part of owning a pet. In fact, socialization makes all the difference between a timid, aggressive, shy, scared, and/or irritable cat and a sweet, cuddly, loving, trusting, bundle of joy. Socialization also teaches your cat the rules of the house, what kind of behavior is allowed and what isn't. This is especially important if you have children in the house that might possibly be chasing your kitty around, picking him up in odd ways, and petting him a little too roughly for his liking. A well socialized cat will put up with all these things without lashing out, and that is what you want in a cat.

almost at that time

Apparently my b-father was 21 when I was born.

I'm almost 21.

That's kind of a very...strange, sort of scary feeling, that I'm of the age that my father conceived me. He also apparently joined the army when he was 21.

I don't think we're very similar.

Also, b-mother has always had a more special place than b-father. I don't really...hmm...care about b-father, even if he primarily exists in my imagination. Maybe I'd try to beat him up if I ever met him (I don't think it's very nice to impregnate an 18 year old girl and then join the army without a notice). I don't think I'd win...haha. If I go searching in Korea, it'd be to see b-mother and her family.