My name is Brian Bomster-Jabs, and I am a Korean Adoptee. I was adopted when I was 5 months old and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. When I arrived, I had a brother waiting for me. Two years later, I would have a sister. Both were also adopted from Korea, and the three of us were all raised by white parents. Growing up in Baltimore, I was exposed to different culture than what the majority of Asians Americans would experience

Probably each one of us said it at some point when we were small children. Some of us said it almost every night. Some begged and pleaded. We laughed and giggled and screamed when our pleadings were granted.

One summer my wife and I toured half of the Silk Road through China. We were dating then. It was my first time traveling in a guided group—I had always traveled alone, cut off and trying for immersion, which might have been a way of reliving of my adoption. Tour groups are common for Korean Koreans, so my wife was used to traveling this way. She had been born and had grown up in Busan, where we met.

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.

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.

Growing up in Korea in the 1960s and 70s, I became accustomed to the McCune-Reischauer system of romanization; I just can’t get used to Daegu and Geoje-do. Since this is a personal essay, I chose to keep the spelling that’s familiar to me.

The week after he returned from the hospital, she came home from teaching her fourth grade class to find him listening to Beethoven and pushing himself around with a broom and dustpan on his lap. She called it the accident again, and he whirled his wheelchair around so his back was to her.