As I mentioned in my last monthly roundup, I will be traveling during the month of November. I am currently in Charleston, South Carolina with Bear and the dorgs on a brief vacation, and then I immediately jet off to Los Angeles before hopping a plane to Seoul, South Korea with my mother and little brother.
For me, it will be the first time in three years — since the pandemic began — that I will be back. For my little brother, it will have been over a decade. He hasn’t been since he was a child, and he’s almost 27 now. As children, neither my brother nor I appreciated much about our heritage, but as adults I think we both feel a yearning to reconnect — to connect — to the land of our blood, if not our birth.
For the past several years I’ve slowly been amassing a collection of private essays that I’ve been calling Diaspora Feelings. I started writing them right after the 2016 US presidential election, when it suddenly felt as though I had become a stranger in my own home. For the first time in my privileged life, I had to grapple with what it meant to be not just a person of Korean descent, but an American. Not just as a citizen, but as an identity.
But that meant grappling with the other parts of my identity too, and I was aghast to discover how little I knew of it. My relationship to Korea was always framed as something that did not belong to me because I had relinquished it. Or rather, I had been relinquished from it by the choices made by generations before me. My mother might have been a pilgrim, a pioneer, a wanderer, but I was an involuntary exile, severed from the place and the people by an accident of birth.
There are other reasons I distanced myself from my Korean identity, not the least of which was because I was so thoroughly bullied by my Korean-American peers as a child that for years I couldn’t even speak the language without shame. Daring to claim my Koreanness was like sneaking a few bites of ice cream straight from the container in the middle of night — full of craving, and loathing myself for the craving.
It’s only recently that I’ve begun to even unpack that guilt and shame, but sometimes it’s like breaking a bone again in order to set it properly. Going back to Korea as an adult has helped. Writing about it has also helped.
Anyway, all this to say that I’ve just launched a new section of my newsletter titled Orphans of the Same Womb1 for my trip(s) to Korea. It will be more along the lines of an old-school blog — photos, some meditations on said photos, etc. These updates may be short, or they may be long, and they may be quite frequent. You can unsubscribe from that section here if it doesn’t interest you.
That’s all for now! See you on the other side of the world.
사랑해,
Why orphans of the same womb? I’ll talk about that in a later essay.