Nobody Knows

There are so many things that you know. Things that you have known since before you could know that you knew them. Where you were born. A hometown. Maybe a hospital. A particular sort of smell that will always signal home. Your birthday. Your mother's face. Your father's voice. Maybe the sound of your siblings. A broader sense of family. Cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents. For you, perhaps, they have always been there. You have always had your name. You knew to turn your head when someone called it. You knew that someone was talking to you when they said it. You knew you could be seen. You knew they were looking for you. It was always you. It was never a question. You knew your name, and no one could take it from you.

But these are not things that I can know.

We are not wholly different. I, too, have black hair and dark eyes. Put our hands next to each other, and you would see that we share the same skin. I have blood like yours. A heart and lungs and bones like yours. Even as I write this, I am sitting in a room a lot like yours. I take the train to work. I buy onigiri and tea at the conbini. You may have overheard me at an izakaya on a Friday night. You've brushed by me on the street. You may have even looked into my eyes. I wasn't remarkable. I might not have even registered in your mind. My Asian face disappearing among the millions just like it, coursing through your mental image of Tokyo. Like another raindrop falling on the surface of the ocean, nothing remarkable. No one you would notice.

It might sound like your life, but the worlds we live in are not the same. Mine exists as an inverse of yours. Everything that you know about who you are, I do not. I have never seen my hometown, because I do not know where it is. My birthday is a guess, an assumption, and not a particularly good one. I could not describe to you the sound of my father's voice, and I have no memories of my mother's face. If I passed them in a crowd, I would have no way of knowing that it was them. I carry no traces of a history, no burden of a family. There are no songs that can carry me home. No smells. No tastes. I am a ship without a harbor. If I need to turn back and head to where I know it is safe, there is nowhere to go. If someone were to call my name, the first one that I was given when I was born, I would not know they were talking to me, because that was taken from me too. I am a child of the void, an unknowable body in your knowable world.

The first records of my existence date from August 4, 1984. This is not when I was born; this is just as far back as the paperwork can illuminate. What happened before that day has been masked by obfuscation and eroded by time. The desiccated bones of the story I was given amount to little more than an unimaginative fiction. A baby left in a train station with only a bag of diapers. A stranger carried the baby home for a night. A police station. The adoption agency. The characters have no names, no faces. There was no paper trail to verify that any of this was true. It was written down after the fact like someone trying to remember a dream they had the night before. It has also been the nightmare from which I have never been able to awaken.

But this is how everyone wanted it. We were not supposed to be people, because people have to be cared for, protected, nurtured. We were numbers, problems really, that needed to be dealt with. When the adoption system absorbed us, we were not the children of Korea anymore. We were products. And just like the appliances, cell phones, and pop idols that would follow us years later, we existed to be sold to the world outside. When we were shipped abroad, often a planeload at a time, we came with receipts and user manuals. South Korea, rather than dealing with the challenges of its own poverty, simply sold its problems to other countries. But is it normal for a problem to have a heartbeat?

When I resurfaced in America three months later, I had a new name and new parents. The name was white, the parents were white, but even though my identity was transmogrified, my body was not, nor would it ever be. And because of the cruel way that America works, not being white comes with consequences. It doesn't matter how they try to paint you. It doesn't matter how they assimilate you. The name on my passport is as American as could be, but it is only an illusion, because the body it is attached to is Asian. It didn't matter that the family I was embedded in moved through the world as white people, with all the attendant privileges and ignorances that it grants. I was trapped in a separate reality. One that they would never be able to see or even imagine. It didn't matter if I was living under the same roof as them. I was not like them. I couldn’t be. I wouldn’t be. I didn’t want to be.

They say that babies can adjust, that babies can adapt. But babies are still human and every human understands loss. An adult might write poetry to cope with what they have lost. Some find their way to the arts. Therapy can be an excellent outlet. Others will just drink. But for a baby, none of these things are yet possible. All a baby can do is cry. It took me six months to run out of tears. Six sleepless months of not knowing where I was or why I was there. And even at the end of that exhausting road, after my small infant mind resigned itself to the fact that I was stuck in that alien place, there would always be an uncertainty about it in the back of my mind. That I was living a life that wasn't mine. That I was pretending to be someone I was not, and if a single thread of the deception snapped, everyone would know that I wasn't supposed to be there at all.

So how does one grow up like this? How do you build a life that is always under the threat of besiegement? What is to be done? There is no guide. There are no lodestars or standard candles. The lives that adoptees must lead are akin to those of rogue planets that have been flung far out and away from their parent systems. Without light, heat, or any sort of meaningful gravity, an adoptee must find their own way through the often treacherous conditions in which they have been lost. In the parallel worlds of immigrant communities, there are places of shelter from the hostile reality of being not white in America. A family, at its most immediate, or an ethnic enclave beyond that. Even as the tidal forces of American assimilation force you to make constant decisions about where you are in relation to a majority and a minority, there is always a cultural mean to which you can return. A unifying chain of identity that can bind a person to both their familial history and the place and peoples from which they descend. However, because the scissors of fate have clipped adoptees so completely from their histories, they have none of that. To be an adoptee is to be alone. Not just in terms of physical proximity. It is an isolation that spreads like black paint in clear water. It is a loneliness in the temporal sense, the psychological sense, the generational sense.

In the decades that I lived in America, I never met another person like me. Moreover, because of where I had ended up in a particularly remote, particularly white part of America, I knew almost no one who was even Asian. When I encountered racism either at home or out in the world, there was no one to help me understand or to help me cope with how it made me feel. When I felt like I didn't belong because I didn't look like anyone around me, my feelings were dismissed. When I wanted to escape and try to find somewhere that I would feel safer, I was told to be quiet and to stop being ungrateful. These things did not just happen once or twice over the years, they were threads that sewed themselves into the fabric of my being. And if you are told enough times to shut up and stop dreaming of something better, you eventually stop dreaming altogether. Safety starts to feel like a fantasy, one no more real than winning the lottery. The inability to bond, to love, or to even see a future where change might happen all become impossible. All you could ever want is slowly eaten by the silence of those around you. It is like swimming in the ocean beneath stars that will always be unfamiliar. They will not know you, and you will not know them.

It is disheartening, isn't it? How does one live in a world so thoroughly isolated from everyone around them? And the truth is that I do not know. To live, to grow, to achieve, to become. These are concepts that have remained elusive throughout my entire life. Because when you have been driven this far into the outskirts of human experience, the only thing you can think about is how you are going to survive. And when you are spending every ounce of your energy on survival, you never have the time to learn how to live. When you are living the emotional equivalent of hand to mouth subsistence, clawing your way out of it is very near to impossible. You may learn to build a shelter for yourself from the scattered remnants in the desolate landscape around you, but it will always be the abode of hungry ghosts. Every day they will whisper in your ear that your life is not your own, that you have nowhere you will ever be able to call home, that you will never escape what fate has done to you.

Some people, though, are incapable of accepting the consequences of fate. Some people try to defy it. Some people do try to go home again. It was not something that either the Koreans who sold us or the others who bought us thought that we would ever do. It was not in their plan that we would ask questions. Lost in their own myopia, it never occurred to any of those that did this to us that we would want to know why or how this happened. No one ever thought we would go looking for our pasts. That at some point we would stand up, and suddenly speak back.

Our defiance has had many faces. Books have been written; documentaries made; political actions taken. There have been demands for transparency and reconciliation in both the personal and political senses. People have searched for their families. They have pleaded on television and in newspapers. Some have even gone door to door with little more than an old photo and a name. Because in the face of such grave injustice, the reclamation of even the most basic parts of yourself can be like pulling a mountain out by its roots. To know who you are and where you come from. To know not just how things happened but also why. To be able to walk through the world like you belong there. These are not petty desires, these are human rights. Because in reality, fate is not the result of divine conspiracy. Fate is the consequence of human acts.

My own season of defiance arrived in the twilight years of my American life. After so long in the wilderness, I realized that the only way forward was to go back to where everything began. I needed to see not only where I came from, but also what might have been. The fourteen-hour flight from America to South Korea transcended not just physical space but temporal as well. And once I was there, as the days peeled off before me, I found that there was someone else who had been inside me. Someone who had been living at the dark end of a quiet street in my psyche. A neglected self. An unknown self. A self that had been separated from me when I was first sent away. Separated and sealed by the harrowing walls of tragedy and time. It was a fleeting feeling, though. An illusion cast by the glinting light of false hope and desperation. But still, I was transfixed by this idea of reclaiming this other self that had been taken from me. I thought that if I could dwell there, if I could just be there and be as far away from the trauma of American life as possible, then I would somehow achieve the magic of being made whole again. I dreamed the first real dreams of my life. The doors of possibility yawned open before me, and I thought that if I could just make it through, then I would finally undo what fate had done. That is what I thought at least.

The engine of these dreams was driven by the one secret desire that I had kept with me my entire life. That one day I would be able to go home and find my family. Maybe even that they had been looking for me this entire time. Ever since I was small, I fantasized that it had all been a terrible mistake. That none of it was ever supposed to have happened in the first place. That deep on the other side of what had been would be the world of what was supposed to be. Not only was it the thing I wanted most in life, it was the only thing I had ever really wanted at all. Couldn't I be a normal Korean, too? With an umma and an appa and a neighborhood in Seoul that I knew better than anything because I had always been there and never, ever been forced to leave? Couldn't I have what everyone else had? Couldn't I be human too?

I did everything I was supposed to do. I filed the paperwork for a search. I waited. I hoped. I called the people I was told to call. I lived through a thousand new forms of devastation. And on a beautiful spring day in Seoul, I was told in no uncertain terms that it was pointless to look any further. That there was no way that they would ever be found. And just like that, before I could even get through them, the doors of possibility slammed shut in front of me. The dream was gone from me, and on ashen wings, my purpose left me too. My season of defiance was over, and in every meaningful way, my life was as well.

Maybe it was hubris. Sometime later, on another spring day, someone told me while looking over the measly scraps of family records that I do have, "You come from a clan that doesn't exist. If you are from this clan, you are its only member." So maybe it was just the way the story was always supposed to be. Maybe all the bullying and beatings I had taken as a child because I was different were just the price of growing up. Maybe I lost the one future I wanted because I had dug too eagerly into my past. Maybe I had just been fighting in vain.

Or maybe not. Maybe injustice is actually injustice. It doesn't matter if they call it charity or benevolence or even love. Maybe no matter how many coats of lies are lacquered onto it, a criminal act is always wrong. Even if the cost of the truth is enormous, and for me it was total, it is the right of the victim to seek it. I gave everything I had, ever would have, and in the end, I was burned alive for it. But what else was I supposed to do? If you do not understand why you are in pain, isn't it your obligation to question it? When you are being hit over and over again, shouldn't you be able to say, "Stop."

Alienation. Isolation. Dispossession. Destitution. Grief. Depression. Exhaustion. These are just some of the many weights that hang around the necks of adoptees. Never at home in either the country where they were born or in the country where they were raised. They are like the people that are always hovering in doorways, always going, never coming. Never quite there, and never quite not. We are a people always on the run. Always trying to outpace our pain, to slip past the claws of our hurt. But the tentacles of trauma are long, often finding their way into every aspect of our lives. For the adoptee, there is almost no part of their life that has not been poisoned by it. Just staying alive can be hard. Relationships are nearly impossible. Some manage. Some find a way to eke out a life. But there are many who do not. Some have lost their minds to it. Others have lost their lives. The cause of death? On paper, broken hearts, suicide, and even murder. But in truth, those are just the knives. Adoption is the hand.

For myself, the best that I could do was escape. To run as far from Korea and America as possible. To just go be somewhere else where none of it had ever happened. For almost a decade now, I have been living quietly in Japan, working a normal job and pretending at a normal life. Not really Korean and not really American, I have done my best to disappear in the human sea that is Tokyo. I blend in fine, even though I am certainly not Japanese. If this is an act of healing, I do not know. If it is one of recuperation or rejuvenation, it remains to be seen. I am here, and that, by itself, is a lot. I know what happened because I have never been allowed to forget. But out there in the streets and on the trains, nobody knows. Which is actually perversely appropriate, because that is the way it has always been. It doesn't matter where I am, how much I am carrying, or just how tired I really am. Nobody knows. No one ever will.