'Was this why I could never shake that lonely gnawing in my belly when I was growing up? Was she the reason?'
In early June 2011, I opened an email that changed my life. It was sent by a woman who worked at the adoption agency that rehomed me when I was a newborn. She was looking for someone with my maiden name who’d been orphaned in South Korea 38 years ago and shipped overseas wearing a onesie with tiny red hearts printed on its front. She was looking for someone like me.
I suddenly felt more alone now that I knew I wasn’t. The storms inside me teetered from numbness to grief to thrill. I caught myself replaying old footage in my head of when I was 5 and 8 and 11 years old, all those summers I spent sprawled out in the backyard or curled up in my bedroom, struggling to push down the loneliness twisting inside.
Those letters created a moat around me, a giant circular ditch deep enough to drown in. I felt trapped by my own emotion, by my mother’s, by my twin’s. The silence in the conference room was as dense as a stick of butter — only for a second, but that second stretched for miles and miles. Then I heard gasps, which made me gasp, and two women raced toward me with their arms outstretched and tears in their eyes. The only thing I could do was place my hand over my heart in hopes of keeping it anchored in my chest.
I learned to call my birth mother “Omma” and my birth father “Appa.” I learned that my twin sister was born 15 minutes earlier than me. I learned that my orphan name was actually my birth aunt’s name, Soon Yi, but reversed. I learned that twins were considered bad luck in Korea in 1973. I learned that my aunt had demanded Omma choose which newborn to keep and which newborn to forget. I learned that Appa cried out for me right before he died.
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