When my daughter was very young, I would talk to her about “the hard part and the fun part” of things. This was my way of honoring the coexistence of both challenges and gifts in life, in the hopes of her learning that both can be true, and both can be held. These simple words often ring so familiarly true for adoptees in many parts of life.
Adoptees know so well what it’s like to have one foot in one world, while the other is in another: connected to biological family and connected to adoptive family, grieving significant loss and deeply appreciative for opportunities, (for transracial or transcultural adoptees) physically perceived one way in the world but identifying in the culture of another, and so on. There is a close, and sometimes exhaustive, acquaintance with this coexistence, this foot in both worlds.
Especially when I became a mother, I felt spiritually closer to my biological ancestors, and I longed to pass ancestral experience to my children. I longed for connection to Korean culture, hoping to raise my children to feel proud of their Koreanhood, as opposed to the confusion I felt growing up as an adoptee. For an adoptee, with little to no exposure to Korean community growing up, attempting to pass Korean culture onto my children felt like a foreigner scanning every page in the translator’s dictionary to form a simple sentence, hoping someone might take pity on her foreignness. I often felt like an imposter.
I felt so disconnected, yet so desperate to connect.
This particular coexistence felt profound and important in motherhood.
And therein lived the “hard part and the fun part” of re-connecting to my culture of origin.
The hard part includes heavy, heavy grief: grieving the loss of the life I could have had, one in which the traditions, the practices, the nuances, the turns of phrases, my ancestors’ stories, the history, were all naturally ingrained in my day to day being. There is grief for loss of connection, that felt severance, with no simple or clear roadmap for return. I’ve felt as if I was flailing around, sometimes so aimlessly, guided by pure faith that my hands would land somewhere tangible and vaguely recognizable.
And the lack of a roadmap is also the fun part.
Without a clear, steady, or certain guide, I can explore so freely, so curiously, leading with my heart’s desires, and trusting the intuition from my longing. Inside the longing lives a tear-welling treasuring, an ancestral appreciation, another breadcrumb leading back home. The way I cherish holding a spoon to scoop my rice, to then dip into my kimchi stew, eaten as a full bite, is likely comparatively so standard to a non-adoptee. That simple act feels like another tiny step to embodying my Koreanness, and I feel proud. It has left me wondering: what if there is a gift in this? A gift in whole heartedly appreciating “the little things,” in a way that perhaps other people are uninspired to access? I have come to consider that this may be “the fun part”: reaching excitedly, with full childlike wonder, for any thing and all things connected to my culture of origin.
CULTIVATING CURIOSITY: What are the “hard parts and fun parts” for me about longing for my culture of origin as a transracial or transcultural adoptee? How can I hold both of those parts simultaneously without judgment?
