In the late fifties, following the Korean conflict, things were so bad in Korea that people tried to leave the country any way they could. College students were no exception. They would pass entrance exams for Korean colleges, but would then often seek admission to colleges in America.

Hearing about America from my best friend, Suh Oak intensified my curiosity about Migook. She related what she had learned about the country in letters she was receiving from her three elder siblings, all of who were studying in America. Suh Oak was the youngest child in her family and the last one to take off from Korea for America. Unlike Suh Oak, I was the very first person in my family to come to the States. My parents had four sons and one daughter. I was number fourth child.

I was really interested in coming to America­. Although I thought that securing a student visa would be a long and almost too arduous a task. Actually, however, it didn’t take as long as I had feared. To begin with, I picked up a “how to book,” Oegook Yu-hahk, Study Abroad, from a bookstore in Seoul. It listed colleges and universities in America along with locations, tuition, religious affiliations, etc.

On Adoption, Genes, and the Difficulty of Imagination

I am reading I Wish for You a Beautiful Life right now, for the first time, suggested to me by another Korean adoptee. It is a book of letters from birth mothers to their babies, letters I wish had come packaged with us. I have found that the letters I appreciate are the ones where the mothers say they will not ask for forgiveness. I wonder why this is. After 30 years, 28 with my adoptive parents, I had thought I was less angry than I am. I find myself judging these women, the ones who want forgiveness, or the ones who try to explain that society would not have let them raise the baby alone, or the ones who say life would have been too hard for their child in Korea. I find myself wanting to tell them that they should have known that life would be hard for us, as adopted kids in another country, with parents of another race not guaranteed to love them or raise them well. Adopted children do not lead easy lives. Sometimes the birth mothers explain that they sent the children abroad so that they would have a "fair" chance. I want to tell these mothers how wrong that thought is. This is from a time, these letters, when Koreans must have thought so much of the outside world, to think that people had a fair chance there. Regardless of race or manner of birth. Or, more likely, these were lies they told themselves. I want to tell them these were lies, to make them see that these were lies. And yet I want to be loved.