Korea

Prior to meeting my family in 2002, my previous knowledge about Korea was pretty much to nothing other than being “found” at the police station, according to adoption documents and that’s all my adoptive parents knew too. For much of my life, I took that as a fact and did not really think much about it. But then over the time, it seemed natural that I’d start to ask questions about myself like what does my parents look like or whether if I have siblings. As for my siblings, I remember having a strong feeling about them and I remember not believing that I was an only child in my biological family and that I must have had a brother or sister. Sure enough, when I met my siblings in 2002, my sister told me she spent some time with me (she was six years old) and helped carry me on her back at times.

If you could recall from the Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back movie, at the end of the movie, Luke Skywalker had learned that Darth Vader was his father but he refused to believe him and fell down the huge tunnel and hung on the antenna at the bottom. Then, he tried to use the Force to communicate with Leia (she actually had some Force) and she felt something and told the pilot to turn back and rescued him. That was a similar feeling that I had with my sister and plus, she’s deaf too.

When I visited the orphanage where I had stayed for about a year before being adopted, I met the director there and I learned that he and the biological parents had falsified my adoption because they couldn’t just given up a baby on purpose (against the law), so that’s why my adoption papers said I was found at the police station. When the father passed away shortly after I visited in 2002, my family had some inheritance money. However, they couldn’t inherit any of it yet because my name was still there on the family records, and they didn’t have any proof of my adoption, so I had to bring my U.S. citizenship and by being a U.S. naturalized citizen effectively revoked previous citizenships. One time, I asked an interpreter who used to work at Korea Association for the Deaf, so she had lots of experience working with deaf people and she said it is extremely uncommon for a family to have two deaf children, let alone a deaf child. And even more uncommon for a deaf child to be adopted by other parents who are deaf too. In fact, she said she only knows of one such person. Guess who that’d be.