Dear Korea,

I’ve had the good fortune to meet people in Korea who have been willing and able to help me with every part of living here. Often it’s felt surreal. Thanks to a couple fellow adoptees, I’ve been able to make steps in my birth family search that would be difficult otherwise because my story doesn’t have a name or a traceable line of anything that might lead to finding someone related to me. Today was an incredibly emotional day full of happiness and sadness. Overwhelming. I visited the orphanage in Jeonju where I was admitted 2 days after I was born. It still exists today, so I was able to visit. I stood in the same room I stayed in. I met a woman who probably took care of me at one point while there. I held children that are staying there today. It was fulfilling yet heartbreaking all at the same time because at one point, I was one of those kids. And being there might be the closest I get to my past, if I don’t find any of my birth family. I’ve had to make peace with the fact that I may never have more information. There are so many stories, each one unique, every journey different. I am grateful to have the family I do. I think that makes it easier for me to accept this gap in my story, but it still doesn’t make it easier to live with it.

I read something recently written by Jeanette Winterson, who is also adopted, that for the first time resonated so deeply with words that I usually can’t find myself to explain how it feels. She writes, “Adopted children are self-invented because we have to be; there is an absence, a void, a question mark at the very beginning of our lives. A crucial part of our story is gone, and violently, like a bomb in the womb. The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story — of course that is how we all live, it’s the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It’s like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It’s like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you — and it can’t, and it shouldn’t, because something is missing.

That isn’t of its nature negative. The missing part, the missing past, can be an opening, not a void. It can be an entry as well as an exit. It is the fossil record, the imprint of another life, and although you can never have that life, your fingers trace the space where it might have been, and your fingers learn a kind of Braille.