This weekend I attended my first KAAN Conference, a weekend dedicated to serving members of the Korean American Adoptee community and increasingly members of the adoptee community as a whole. I learned about this conference through one of the many Facebook groups I am a member of, ones I joined when I began imagining, verbalizing, breaking myself into the idea of searching for my birth family. This was a painful and scary desire to put into words — since childhood, the first question people ask when they find out I was adopted were “So do you want to find your birth family?” Those words tumbled out of their mouths with such ease and hit me straight in the gut every time, feeling like a weapon wielded against my tenderest spot.
When I was a kid I would paint stories in my mind trying to envision who my birth parents were, sometimes with my adoptive parents and more often alone. A conversation over dinner evolved into imagining my birth family as Chinese royalty or acrobatic circus performers. As I grew up, the scenes became foggy and bordered with spikes that warned me of danger if I ventured there. I felt the antithesis of “What you don’t know won’t hurt you”; it all started to hurt quite a bit. My dream world transitioned to pictures of my future, situations that I was yet to experience but could if I wanted, if I willed things to happen in the way that I chose. I got used to drawing my own sword of “I’m happy with the life that I have and I don’t need to know who my birth family is.” The attackers learned to retreat and I became resolute in my strategy. I swiveled my head forward and I dared not look back. Yet occasionally I would glance off into that middle distance of “what-ifs” and “could-be’s” like a bridge that was burned but only charred, somehow holding on by a thread.
Grief and time caught up to me and somehow I knew those two would never be fooled. I was 22 when I lost my maternal grandmother and 24 when I lost my maternal grandfather, and with each subsequent loss I found my mind wandering back to that burned bridge, those empty spaces they left reminding me of the world of emptiness that the premise of my life stands shakily upon. No longer could I maintain the illusion that I didn’t care where I came from for the sake of escaping someone’s interrogation. In the tiniest, softest voice I started to tell those around me that I still wonder, that perhaps I wonder so much that I want to venture across that bridge and see what there is to uncover. I was so afraid of embodying a cliche or fulfilling the adoptee narrative that everyone jumps to — the miraculous journey to the homeland to search for “myself.” Luckily I was met with kindness, gentle pushes, and acknowledgement that this is not an easy thing to admit that one wants. I have taken baby steps going forwards and backwards, but I can say with certainty that I am on the track to embodying those dreams I had as a child, even if that road leads to an endless amount of questions rather than answers.
These small steps led me to the Westin O’Hare alongside my best friend and fellow adoptee, Erica, who agreed to join me without question. Stepping foot into the hotel felt like entering an alternate universe where people looked so different from us, yet we knew we were the same. Adoptees of all ages, abilities, hairstyles, dialects, fashion choices, and body types roamed through the hallways and in the main ballrooms. Though the majority of the attendees were Korean adoptees, there was a significant number of Chinese adoptees, as well as adoptees from Colombia, Russia, Vietnam, First Nations, India, and other places around the world. I was struck by a feeling of belonging I’ve never experienced so strongly, partially by the sheer number of us. Throughout my high school and college years I have been in circles with Chinese adoptees but in groups no bigger than 5 or 10; the conference hosted 350 of us. For once I felt truly enveloped in understanding, flanked on all sides by stories that sounded like mine.
We attended sessions that focused on media representation of the orphan narrative, mental health in the adoptee community, redefining intimacy, recovering from people-pleasing, all led by smart and thoughtful therapists, organizers, creatives, teachers. We wrote words of fiction in a writing workshop and I felt brave enough to read my piece into a microphone. In a session about our learned “fawn” trauma response and somatic techniques to combat it, one of the presenters said, “Really profound moments can happen in very small movement.” A twinkly bell went off inside me.
A session we made sure to attend, a step into that painful void we are trying to turn towards, focused on adoptees who are in reunion with their birth families. We listened to stories of complicated dynamics and difficult journeys navigating reunion with their Korean kin. Not surprisingly, the majority of these stories involved even more loss and pain mixed with the “miraculousness” of finding the family from which they came. The hero’s journey trope leads you — me, non-adoptees, everyone — to believe that searching for your roots is like finding the gold at the end of the rainbow, the X marks the spot where your true self lies. Though I knew it would not be storybook in any way, I still sat there shocked by the way adoptees were treated by their birth parents or siblings. Still yet, I felt envy of their ability to know at all, angry at the Chinese government for being even more careless about preserving our documents and our truths. It drove home the notion that the hero’s return is not the end of the journey at all but only the beginning, and that the experience of adoption is lifelong. I knew that and I still needed to learn it.
So many moments were tiny bandaids and stitches that patched up wounds accumulated over the years. We met women who just graduated college and formed an adoptee space for one another who reminded me of Erica and I and where our friendship began. We gathered with the other Chinese adoptees and dreamed of a space like this meant specifically for us, and it felt like planting the seeds of what could be in the coming decades. The most profoundly enjoyable and moving connection we made was with two Korean adoptee sisters who took us under their wings and immediately felt like aunts and friends. After a night of lively and introspective conversation, it was as if we had known each other for years. In some other life maybe we had. I’m so grateful that we’ve crossed paths with them in this one.
As I was walking through the lobby with an iced coffee in hand, halfway through the second day and mentally preparing for the next session, I passed a bridal party taking photos next to the hotel’s indoor fountain. One of the wedding photographers stopped me and asked me what event I was part of, no doubt noticing all the similar-looking people surrounding him. He was an older man whose accent implied that he was from a European country, possibly France. I said it was a conference for adoptees. “What is ‘adoptee?’” he asked. I paused and smiled to myself, considered the question and said, “It’s when someone has been adopted, or born somewhere and taken somewhere else.” He gave me a look of heart-filled half-understanding and said, “Oh, well, good job!” I smiled at his sincerity and walked away, considering that, even in this alternate universe, I was asked to explain to a stranger what exactly we were and why we were there. But I also felt like I had done a good job. I had come to this place feeling like a new student on my first day at school and I came out with more knowledge about myself and my community than I had imagined was possible. I had done this alongside a dear friend and we deepened the bond between us. I allowed this stranger’s naive but well-intentioned words to ring true for a couple minutes as I sat looking out the lobby window: in a life that is filled with perfectionism and not-enoughism and self adjusting and even self loathing, I’m doing a good job. We are not walking across these bridges of self-discovery alone. We are doing a good job at taking care of one another. As I gaze into the ever-growing chasm of the unknown, these are the truths I can trust to bear the weight of my longing.
Thank you to the KAAN organizers and volunteers and all the Korean adoptees who so warmly welcomed us into the fold of their community. If you are an adoptee reading this and want to share this post, please feel free :) Huge love to all the people I met this weekend, pictured or not <3