Hiking Toward Koreanness: An Adoptee Returns to Her Motherland
Adoption is one of those forks in the road where many of us try to glimpse through the trees to the other path, the other world.
That’s
*
KoreanAmerican
was
Korean

It’s because you’re white
be
Are you alone? How old are you? Wow, you’re tough!
.
(be) manly, valiant, brave, courageous, gallant, vigorous

When I started my job, I constantly worried that my co-teacher thought I was lazy, bad at my job, mannerless. All those hook-sharp insecurities, tugging at the back of my mind. One day, he told me: “I think you are very brave, to come to Korea. It’s not easy.”
Rachel Rostad's work has been published by Mask Magazine, The Margins, and Hyphen Magazine's blog, among others.
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More in this series
My Hope as a Parent Is Something I Share with My Birth Mother
This folder contained memories I did not have, information about a family I did not know.
One Mother, Two Mothers, No Mother
Adoption didn’t give me a forever mother. Being in reunion with my birth mother did not make me wholly mothered, either.