Strangely, I have never felt the urge to find my own biological family. I admit that I am a little afraid of such a search, but mostly I am just apathetic. While growing up, I often mentally perceived myself as "white." What surprised me is that in this, I was not alone: A recent survey of Korean-Americans adopted between 1955 and 1986 shows that more than half saw themselves in the same skewed way, describing themselves as Caucasian. Many times I too forgot that my origins lay halfway around the world. But I am not ashamed of my heritage. Over time I have become very proud of my slanted eyes and flattened face, but these traits are not central to my existence or my common bond with society as a human.
When it was my turn to be given up, I was one of the "lucky ones." My note very specifically spelled out my name and my birth date; I spoke full and flawless Korean so that I could communicate my needs; I had been found not long after I was abandoned. My younger, adopted sister, who came into the family two years after me, was one of the unlucky ones. Her note was lost, and no one knows exactly how long she was left to survive on her own, but it was long enough to bow her legs and weaken her bones from malnutrition, to put disease into her gums and to essentially break a young child's spirit.
The lone picture of me taken right before I left Korea for the first and last time, snapped outside of what I assume are the walls of the orphanage, shows me to be a petite girl with remnants of baby fat still clinging to my cheeks, ostensibly healthy and striking an almost military pose, arms stiffly at my sides. My hair has that slicked-down, Louise Brooks "Diary of a Lost Girl" look that is probably common to all such places, and my face has a shine to it. It's as if the photographer asked me to smile for my new parents, and maybe relayed to me that I was going away to America. But, sad and perplexed, I could only give him a mild look of defiant confusion. My picture, so different from my sister's, at least shows that I was not defeated; hers limns out a bleak existence, with her standing forlornly against a white wall. She just looks lost.
In 1976, I came to New York, literally with the clothes on my back and a single, official "travel certificate," which permitted me "to pass freely without let or hindrance ... for the purpose of adoption." I was approximately 3 feet tall and weighed 28 pounds, only three pounds more than my 10-month-old son weighs now. I am told that I adjusted very quickly, that Korean Social Services, the government agent responsible for my adoption, must have taken good care of me, though I arrived carrying scabies and with a bandage on my forehead. Two years later, almost to the day, my younger sister arrived and I was there to greet her. I felt part of a family once again, and I strove to ensure that she would shortly feel the same.
What I ask now is, why at the age of 3? If I had been left as a newborn, my Korean family would have been abandoning an infant, an almost blank slate, unable to express who she was at this nascent stage. And I can understand the circumstances that may lead a person to do that, such as the financial inability to feed and clothe and take care of a new baby.
But by leaving me at 3, they were abandoning all I had become in those years; they were forsaking me as a young person, a girl named Won-Hee Kim. They were not saying, "We cannot take care of you," but, "We no longer want to take care of you." And I wonder what I was like, what it was about me that caused this action, since in our solipsistic society, I know in the end it must have been my fault. Like a child of divorce, I fear the blame rests on my shoulders, even if, rationally, I know it's likely they just wanted a better life for me, and saw America as a shining beacon.
On this side of the world, I had a ready-made family waiting: a 12-year-old sister, two parents, two sets of grandparents, one aunt and her son. When you meet me, you meet all of them, imbedded within my personality. Most noticeably, I talk with my hands and stuff food down people's throats. Yet I believe in the theory of evolution, having studied it for nearly seven years, so I know that the nuances of my personality were predisposed before I was walking and talking, before any environmental influences had time to take hold. But we all know that a person develops as a confluence of nature and nurture, so I wonder: What behaviors do I have that are a remnant of my first three years of life? What still connects me to that far and distant country?
Next page: I am not yet to the point of looking for my birth parents, and I may never be