"True" identity

Last Saturday, I raged in Mexican Spanish about a fight that had exploded in the middle of our futbol match. Sunday evening, I went for Chinese food with my teammates and fell into Chinese conversation with the a-yi cooking our meal. On Wednesday night, I sat down with my Irish-Italian dad and had a beer to celebrate the day to honor the saint after whom he was named.

Some adoptees would look at these experiences and say I've been brainwashed into subverting my "true" Korean identity. You think I'm kidding, but I'm not. There's a strong sentiment in some segments of the adoptee community that our birth identity, our birth home, our birth family are our "real" identities, and our adopted identities are just temporary and/or less valid.

I went through a phase where I tried really hard to be 100% Korean. I studied Korean fervently on my own, I listened exclusively to Korean music, I made sure people knew I was Korean. No one had pressured me to do it or anything, I just felt a really strong desire to be Korean, to "go back" to that part of me that fit my slanty eyes and black hair.

It took me two trips to Korea and moving to Los Angeles to realize that I never was going to be 100% Korean. I had some pretty harsh experiences with Koreans in LA, and being almost totally unable to communicate even the most basic things while in Korea forced me into that realization. And I'm not saying I handled that realization particularly well, at least at first. I guess I was pretty angry at times, frustrated that my Korean identity was only ever going to be "half-hearted."

But I didn't take the path of pushing on where I knew there would be no success, and I didn't close my anger about it all in. I started to find myself in other places. In a Mexican futbol league that I had played in for several years. In studying Mandarin Chinese. In spending a year in Taiwan.

I think I first had the idea in China, the idea that as an adoptee, I have the opportunity to create my own identity, far more than many other people do. Being adopted has, perhaps in some ways, deprived me of one identity, but by doing so has given me a desire, a drive to create my own identity that maybe I wouldn't have had otherwise. Korean ethnicity is one part of my identity, but it is only one part, and not the whole thing, not the basis for everything of who I am.

And I don't believe that acknowledging/accepting/BEING other parts of my identity, including those adopted elements (yes, those awful elements like my "white" last name or my American citizenship) means I'm subverting my "true" identity.