한국에 가요 I am going to Korea

Tuesday, 2/10/2015

I always knew I would go back someday.  Like most plans I make for myself, never was there really a definite when or how in place, but I have always had this nebulous internal certainty that I would go back to explore my birth country.

Plans started to crystallize last year when my good friend from med school, Peter, who grew up in Seoul, went back for a family trip.  I later learned that he was planning more trips back, and then we realized it would be the perfect opportunity for me to go back as well.  We would get an awesome M4 year trip together out of it, and this way, my inability to speak Korean would be less likely to get me hopelessly lost/starved to death.

The other half of the preparations was seeing if I could find out anything about my biological family.  Now I first want to throw out a big disclaimer, and as this is a subject that gets awkwardly tiptoed around in conversation, I'mma just go ahead and clear it up now.  Unlike many other foreign-born adoptees, I do not have any strong feelings of necessity to learn more about or meet my biological family, but I'm also not afraid to do so.  I am blessed with an incredibly loving and supportive family here and I couldn't care less about the cut-and-paste nature of our pedigree.  I have explained this to them, and they, unsurprisingly, have been very understanding about it all, and have even gotten the adoption documents out of the safe deposit box for me to start Sherlock Holmes-ing on.  

Here's me shortly post-adoption and with awesome socks and Asian baby bangs.

On that front, with help from Peter and his dad, we have my biological mother's name, the name of the hospital I was born at (which seems to have closed sometime in the last 26 years), and the name of the adoption agency that managed my case.  We've also contacted that adoption agency, and they are currently working to find and contact my biological mother to see if she is interested in speaking with me.  It's hard to say what the chances are of that actually working out, but in general, my attitude towards it is that if I'm going to be there, it is a worthwhile and unmissable opportunity.

Nevertheless this difficult-to-articulate compulsion to make this trip to Korea is certainly not borne out of of any sort of dissatisfaction with my life and family here at home or unspoken yearning to find and connect with my biological family.  However, that is not to say either that I don't feel some kind of subliminal, inexorable pull towards the country of my birth, some ancient magnetism to a place where perhaps there are things to be experienced, seen, touched, intuited, reflected, and stumbled upon that may shape my human experience in important and unknowable ways.

Of course I am nervous.  Nervous to be living in a new city of over 10 million people with one friend for five weeks, nervous to be an outsider and an American that looks Korean in a monocultural country while possessing a tenuous-at-best grasp of the language and culture; nervous at the possibility of being confronted with new knowledge and feelings about my past that might affect me in unexpected and powerful ways; nervous about trusting myself around ubiquitous and dirt cheap delicious Korean street food and soju.  Yes, there are many things to be nervous about, and this trip feels at once both long overdue and frighteningly premature, but I've never felt that nervousness was a good reason to not do something, so here I am.

The name of this blog 귀향 (gwee hyang) is a Korean term that means "returning to one's birth country" or "homecoming" to smooth over the translation a bit.  I wanted to choose a Korean title for the blog and for all of the posts not only to squeak in that little bit of extra practice, but also because I intend to immerse myself as much as possible in the duality of my experience and of my heritage, to intentionally put myself out of my comfort zone to meet people, see things, and adopt the culture that I was adopted from to get the most from these five weeks, and I want this blog to reflect that.

This trip is not a quest to find my biological family and in so doing, fill some hole in my heart, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't still have some deep significance--that I believe spending time in the country where I was born and where my birth culture evolved might hold some very real and very important lessons for me.  In that spirit, my expectation is that expectations are a foolish exercise in futility.  I have no idea what I'll learn in these next several weeks, or in what form those lessons will come, I only know that it is an undertaking worth doing and that I feel almost like I have to do it.  So for me, and for you, my dear friends, at worst, these correspondences will be a travel blog detailing my time in a beautiful country with an fascinating culture that I've always wanted to experience.  But at best, it might be a singularly revealing and formative exploration of my identity as an adopted Korean American and human being with a sense of self itch to scratch.  Either way, I'm so excited and grateful to be here and to share it with you.

I miss you all already, and if it could prove useful, here is my address in Seoul (don't worry, I promise it's just barely less mystifying to me--just copy the shapes the best you can and call it good).

City: 서울
District: 서대문구
Street: 연희로 29길21 파레스 빌라

Until later, bon voyage, friends! 

(I went with French there because all I got going on Korean-wise right now is 잘 비행기가 출발하고 있어요 which roughly means "Good plane departing, oh herro prease.")