Auntie holds you a bit tighter and whispers, “괜찮아 . . .”

Her cheek presses next your ear as you walk together with Uncle,

“Kwaenchanah . . . Kwaenchanah . . . It’s okay . . . It’s okay . . .”

You never saw the box get lowered into

the ground. But you could feel it.

IN THE BEGINNING

Many of our families were dead to begin with. At least, socially. And then declared so through institutionalized transfers of legal, residential, and relational custody. Something happened to my family; rather, something didn’t happen. Then, I was adopted.

While your adoption story may not include a physical death, adoptions and funerals are alike in that they both turn natural facts into a social event. Their difference lies in how much we wonder if one could be avoided more than the other. And who’s to say what’s natural and what’s not? Who’s first? Who’s a mother?

Your medical records might be non-history as far as curiosity is concerned, let alone useful documentation for preventive and diagnostic care. There may even be a lack of clarity regarding how you were relinquished and identified by systems of child welfare in the first place. You have reasons to doubt. For some adoptees, death and life become so vaguely indistinguishable, it’s no wonder you might struggle to make sense of one in your quest to honor the other.

The social death is surgical. Your birth certificate may include your adoptive name with no mention of the one given to you at birth. Or the one assigned to you at birth may have been penciled in by a social worker, and then re-configured into the words adoptive parents assign. Typography happens to honor and bury us under first and last names, maybe even brand-new sets of clothes and fresh linen. Not all biography can hide, though. When we leave the house we’re still identified as an outsider. The words parents give aren’t weighty enough to keep the stone in place. As if who we are is too alive to stay put in new soil. For a child, and even still for some adults, that’s not always perceived as a strength, so we might develop our own creative ways to hide our face and deny our history. The amount of cognitive and emotional bandwidth it all takes from us is extraordinary.

Adoptees have always been trying, though. Speaking. Performing. Responding to the event. Enduring the process. Resisting. Only recently, though, have we and our families been given formal, accessible platforms to make provision for what’s been lost through relinquishment and adoption; and how it shapes the course of our development immediately, actively, and over a lifetime.

Without considering the contextualized history of the adoptee community, the lack of adoptee representation looks like we just don’t have anything to say on the matter. You might even conclude that anything you have to say about it doesn’t matter. However, we’re served and we serve those around us when we’re willing to explore the dialogue from different angles. Participate in it, too.

If you want to understand what’s going on in your life today, it makes sense you’d need to have a fundamental awareness about what happened yesterday. But the process through which we can make sense of that information can be confused with loaded questions, misleading answers, and unsettling promises. As uncomfortable as it may seem, though, our participation makes a difference.

THINKING ABOUT ADOPTION

We humans seem to be born wired for an assurance of things unseen. For example, object permanence is a developmental capacity that guides our actions in reference both to a here and now and a there and then. I wouldn’t be surprised if it has to do with some combination of survival and salvation. How else could another country become a reality here on earth or within our hearts?

Dr. Adam Kim and his colleagues introduced a psychological measurement called the Birth Family Thoughts Scale. It was created to help researchers and practitioners understand more about the lived experiences of transracial and international adoptees.

• I think about my birth parents.

• I wonder about whether my parents ever think about me.

• I think about whether or not I am similar to my birth parents.

• I wondered about brothers and sisters in Korea.

• I am curious about my Korean name.

• I imagine what it would have been like to have grown up in Korea.1

According to the history collected by Eastern Child Welfare Society, my mom was an extrovert, and my dad an introvert, while he was alive.

Those details may seem inconsequential to the average person. But, for me as an adoptee, I’ve grown to receive any information about my family and origin story as a gift. And as a kind of pain inevitable with childbirth, as if relinquishment and adoption induce a lifelong extension of someone’s delivery.

MY BEGINNING

Busan is a natural beauty. The land itself is something you can’t make up. I’ve seen it. I was born there. My parents were, too. Dal-Mi was kind, funny, and carefree. Seon-Ho was quiet, serious, and passionate. Each in their early twenties when they started dating. They’d walk hand in hand along the ocean-view backdrop that today gives around 3.4 million people a perfect place to pray or party any day of the week. It’s where they’d take off their shoes, dig for gold, laugh, and chase sand crabs around with their illegitimate toddler.

Olympic rings were just around the corner. For a 1980s Korea, it was a chance to be adored on the world’s stage. It could be a city on a hill despite its body being severed in half by war thirty years earlier and its mind harried from an atrocious thirty-five-year colonization by Japan. Korea’s internment camps, branded as “Social Purification Projects,” were also beginning to synchronize, some even in partnership with a local church presence that likely operated in the shadows of the Holt family’s ministry. To nourish a glittering post-war economy, “welfare centers” began to protect their beautiful peninsula from “rough sleepers, disabled people, some orphan children, and even ordinary citizens who just failed to show their identification when asked.” Not only were there rumors of people disappearing, but there were also government-sanctioned rules to incite the sudden abductions.2 It is not insignificant how our basic human desire to be seen and loved lays out to countless ends and imprints across the earth.

For Dal-Mi and Seon-Ho, it brought them together in home and heart. It changed their names to “Omma” and “Appa.” They named me Hee-Seong. I was their son. They were my world. And amid Korea’s struggle to breathe, we shared meals, dreamed, and woke up together as a family for three years.

YESTERDAY

Imagine portrait-worthy sunrises mingled with breezy ocean air and a perma-loop soundtrack of pulsing waves and hungry seagulls. In our bedroom, a gentle glow forms a warm outline around makeshift blackout curtains. The smallest touch of light is enough to give me the zip of an energizer bunny. Mornings began with Omma and Appa praying for a few more minutes of sleep as I rolled around on their bed like they were all my personal bouncy house. Something catches my attention. A gift I received for my birthday last month. I turn onto my belly and slide backward onto the floor.

Omma grabs my arm, “Careful, don’t fall!”

I crouch down for a moment, “Daddy, see??”

My eyes are fixed as I lower a wooden puzzle piece into its place. In colorful Hangul font it says, “가족” (ka-jok; family).

I look up at Appa. He smiles, “Doesn’t fit.”

I study the board and try again. With his head still resting on the pillow, he lifts his hand out from under the blanket. I try my best to land mine into his. It...