Language Lessons: On Adoption, Identity and Loss

My older daughter wakes me by clambering up on my bed one chilly Saturday morning, all high spirits and flailing limbs. Seven years old, still chubby-cheeked and often pigtailed, her generous smile is a mirror of my husband’s, her big brown eyes almost identical to mine. Many people see her father first when they look at her, but I am continually amazed by how much she resembles me. She was the first person in whom I ever clearly saw myself, and adoptees don’t take these things for granted.

“Mama,” she says, thrusting a piece of torn-out notebook paper in my face, “look what I did!” I expect to glimpse a colorful drawing, a poem, or her latest story. Instead I find myself gazing at a page filled top to bottom with Korean words. She laughs her delighted toy-car horn of a laugh and informs me that she’s been practicing with the language flash cards I gave her a while ago.

In kindergarten she began pestering me to learn Korean and teach it to her. I had a tutor at one point, until life got too overwhelming and the money for lessons evaporated; now I study only off and on, without a teacher. I am under no illusions about my skills — after a solid year away from one-on-one instruction, I can read some Korean if you give me all afternoon to do it, say hello and thank you and a few other phrases, spout some useful-but-on-their-own-useless vocabulary words, order from a Korean menu, and…that’s about it.

My Rosetta Stone software doesn’t trip my years-dormant homework anxiety or stare at me expectantly like my tutor could, and is therefore less than motivating. Of course I should be motivated anyway, because my daughter has asked me to please study more and teach her. At her age, she’s already gathered that language is a big, obvious cultural indicator, a test neither of us can pass. I don’t know how much her multiracial identity affects her desire to learn Korean, if indeed it is related at all. While our situations are not the same, I can’t help but see a great deal of overlap between our experiences – between her trying to figure out what it means to be more than one thing, and me being just the one thing and always feeling like something else entirely.

There is and always will be a limit to how much I can teach and pass on to my kids when it comes to our shared heritage. If my hands aren’t precisely empty, they are far from full. My sister Cindy swears I could never pass for a Korean raised in a traditional Korean family. Everything about you screams American, she said, the first time we met. Cindy describes herself as “Americanized” – she was born in Korea and raised by my birth parents, but eventually married and has made most of her closest friends outside the Korean American community. I, on the other hand, am just plain old “American”; I never had a Korean culture to try and tamp down or turn away from.

As a kid, the fact of being Korean, showing my own face to the world, meant little more to me than a catalogue of differences, negative space I wasn’t sure how to fill. I saw people who resembled me only on television and only sparingly, and they seemed almost as foreign, as exotic to me as they were to the white kids I grew up with. It was a struggle for me not to think of Asian people in terms of stereotypes (shy; reserved; studious and good at math; robotic rule-followers). Some white friends and family members would joke about “nerdy Asians” and comment on my good grades as if these things were just part of my nature, built into my DNA. I would be a first-generation college attendee, but that didn’t seem to matter to anyone – the expectation was always that I would excel; the implication that my race was the reason.

Could one appropriate one’s own culture of origin? Was the desire to learn more about my birth culture hopeless, or even wrong?

The hope that I could one day learn how to be Korean and not just look it was one I could only have acquired as a young adult, free from the confines of my rural white upbringing and surrounded by fellow Asians for the first time. I had spent all of my childhood as “the only one,” wishing away my Koreanness. By eighteen, though, while I understood what I wasn’t (white), I had yet to figure out what I was. 

In college and after, I don’t think I was quite conscious of this desire I had to learn how to seek out, imitate, re-absorb Koreanness in some fashion — but I did notice other Koreans, other Asians, and quietly envy them. I came to recognize that Koreans were not being complimentary when they told me I didn’t look Korean. Are you Chinese? Are you part white? Are you sure? I mean, you’re adopted, so how can you be sure?

While I didn’t appreciate being called a banana, it was tough to argue the point when it happened. And perhaps, as an adoptee, I had no right to try and grasp at the knowledge others had that I didn’t. Could one appropriate one’s own culture of origin? Was the desire to learn more about my birth culture hopeless, or even wrong? This exploration had certainly never been encouraged when I was young — was it just too late for me to start now?

Today I still really haven’t got answers to these questions. I can’t help but feel envious of other Koreans at times – not only because many of them can speak a language I can’t, but because that language represents a real and undeniable link to a culture and community of which I have never been a part. Language fluency may be only one of countless ways to feel connected to a history, a people, a clan, but from where I stand – well outside the barrier – it seems like a deeply important one, one of so many codes I’ll never be able to crack.

At the café where I had my first Korean lesson, I spotted her right away, the way you do when you are looking for someone who also happens to be looking for you. I watched her enter and saw her eyes dart around behind rimless rectangular glasses before settling on me. I wondered what she saw, and if she could already tell that I was an imposter.

My sister and father, who have both taught language lessons at their respective churches, suggested that I find a language school at my local Korean church. But when I called the Korean Presbyterian parish just down the road to inquire about lessons, the man who answered told me that the school only accepted students who were native speakers; who already heard and spoke some Korean at home. “Children only,” he said. “Are you a child?”

“Uh, no, but –”

He hung up on me mid-sentence. Which might have ended my search for lessons, honestly, if I hadn’t had my daughter to report back to.

The effects of adoption don’t end at placement, or even when an adopted child grows into an adult. Nor are they limited to the adopted person — they can be felt unto the next generation, and the next.

Of the potential tutors I found online, Angie was the only one who got back to me. As we shook hands I was acutely aware of the anxiety I always feel around Koreans older than myself — as if I am about to make some grievous mistake, or say something rude without realizing it. Once we were seated, Angie asked me why I wanted to study Korean. It was a perfectly natural question, but before answering I busied myself with pulling out my notebook and pencil, weighing how much I ought to tell her.

The truth was complicated, with roots in my adoption and the fact that my chatty eldest child came home from school one afternoon and told me that a Korean classmate had asked her why she couldn’t speak Korean and why she didn’t “look” Korean. This was nothing new – as far back as preschool, her Asian classmates would express surprise when they first saw me. At that age, it makes sense some kids would have a fairly narrow view of what Asian people looked like. It’s not limited to kids; one time, when I picked her up in the carpool lane, a new teacher at the preschool almost didn’t let her get in the car with me. “I would never have known she was yours!” she exclaimed.

These comments aren’t necessarily increasing in frequency as my daughter gets older, but I think they are beginning to bother her. As much as a child her age can be, she is proud of her heritage. She readily identifies as Asian and American, Korean and Lebanese and Irish. We’ve tried to avoid stressing the fractions, so she’s Korean, not half-Korean — as Korean as I am. When given the choice of what country to present on at school, she chose Korea, and proudly showed off her hanbok. At home we talk a lot about race, and history, and how bigotry isn’t a thing of the past, and she is the one who begins many of these conversations.

In years past, when people said unfortunate things to her or to me or to both of us, she didn’t seem to care that much. This year, for the first time, she’s seemed a bit more troubled by the questions from nosy white people, the occasional cultural test posed by a fellow Asian kid. She knows I’m adopted. She knows that part of my history has made me different from other Koreans (not that they are a monolith) in some very particular ways, and so – in ways she is just beginning to think about – it’s made her and her sister different, too.

What I always knew, but rarely thought much about before having a child of my own, is that the effects of adoption don’t end at placement, or even when an adopted child grows into an adult. Nor are they limited to the adopted person — they can be felt unto the next generation, and the next. I know my kids will one day have far more complicated questions of identity to consider for themselves, questions that won’t be answered with any language litmus test. For now, I want to help them understand as much as they can about how our family got to be this way, and all the different parts that make them who they are, so they can eventually decide for themselves who they want to be.

In the café, over the low chatter of other evening customers and the click-clack of laptop keys, I told Angie about reuniting with my birth family, adding that I wasn’t really here for their sake. When I mentioned my daughters, she seemed to understand. She rummaged in her bag for a workbook and pushed it across the table: “For you and your kids to share!” Grinning, brightly clothed children — none of whom appeared to be Korean — danced around the book’s pale yellow jacket. The cover wear and faint pencil markings betrayed years of use, but the book had clearly been well cared for. “It used to be my son’s,” she told me.

She began by taking me through all the consonant and vowel sounds, one by one. I did my best to parrot pronunciations and copy each pencil stroke. She showed me how to pair up sounds — side-by-side or one on top of the other — to construct syllables and short words. Some were familiar to me, thanks to my birth family: grandmother, grandfather, mama, daddy. Older sister. Hello. Thank you. I practiced new words, too, and characters, syllables, and words bloomed from my pencil, diminutive bars and circles and boxes that I would have to learn to how to decode.

“Did your parents give you a Korean name?” Angie asked. On a fresh piece of notebook paper, I carefully wrote out my Korean name: 수정. The name my father chose for me before I was born. Next to it, I wrote Cindy’s Korean name: 인정. There was the common syllable, linking us together, long before either of us knew the other existed.

The smell of coffee and pastries mingled with pencil lead as I bent over my notebook, letting my too-sweet black tea go cold. At the end of the lesson Angie gave me her son’s book, telling me to study until I could write all the letters and combine them into syllables and short words without looking. I felt heartened by the relative ease with which I had just learned to write – it was the easy part, I knew, but Angie hadn’t laughed or called me a banana or implied I was too far behind to bother, and as we packed up our things she said, “I give you credit, you know. I wouldn’t have tried to learn a new language at your age.”

The letters filling the opening pages of my new college-ruled notebook in neat, orderly columns already seemed like friendly new acquaintances, if not old comrades. They were only basic building blocks, and I might never achieve the fluency I needed to construct whole worlds, but the language of my original family did seem a little less mysterious than it had before.

When my daughter and I “study” Korean together now, I make her write out all the sounds. Sometimes she gets her flash cards and writes vocabulary words. She labors over the characters, erasing and recreating words, trying to make each one perfect. She can count, knows her colors, can recite the different names for different family members. She’s capable of learning so much more, I know — she should probably have formal lessons. I wish a tutor for her were in the budget, but for now she’s stuck with Rosetta Stone, books and flash cards, and me.

The work of recovery and healing after adoption never ends — there are always new stumbling blocks, new and unexpected gifts. There are many different kinds of victories to be found.

I often think back to my sister’s pronouncement, about how everything about me “screams American.” I think she was just trying to explain that there are many things that mark some Koreans as Korean beyond appearance, and so most would quite naturally and instantly realize there is something off about me. She is probably right; I know that I will never be Korean the way our birth parents are, the way she is. My adoption isolated me, cut me off from our culture, in countless irrevocable ways. For me, this might be the toughest thing about being adopted, now that I’ve reunited with my birth family and have the answers to questions I always wondered about. The biggest gap left in my life, the real legacy of adoption for me and my children, is the disconnect between the culture I was born into and the one in which I’ve been raised and completely assimilated.

I’ll spend the rest of my life contemplating, considering and reconsidering adoption and its impact on what family and identity and belonging all mean to me. But I’m not alone anymore; I have company on this island. Even the casual, snail’s-pace study of my family’s first language is important, an inheritance I never thought I’d be able to share with my kids. The work of recovery and healing after adoption, for me at least, never ends — there are always new stumbling blocks, new and unexpected gifts. When I watch my daughter writing in Korean, when we talk about our family history, when she seems sure about who she is (never mind what other people say) and her place in our family and in the world, I cannot help but feel there are many different kinds of victories to be found, and many ways to heal.

Sitting side by side, my daughter and I scan the familiar characters she has written, the rows of letters she has already deployed into words. She taps the page with the tip of her pencil. “I wrote all the words I could think of. Should I practice the alphabet again?” When I say say sure and smile at her, she smiles back. “Okay, then,” she says. “I’ll start at the beginning.”