life before the search

I don’t remember Korea as an infant. A stack of documents of behavioral observations, medical exams, foster care reports and administrative documents compose my early life.

I was adopted just shy of a year old to a loving couple in Scottsdale, Arizona. It’s in this first house that I have my earliest memories of playing in a cupboard in the family room. In my early years I was very fortunate to grow up around other adoptees. There weren’t a lot of us, but enough that it didn’t carry the typical stigma it may in early adolescence.

Moving away from the lizard-people in Scottsdale, my family moved to a quiet town outside of the city called Cave Creek. This is the place that I consider my home. I grew up and formed a consciousness there. My late teen years are when I really began to think more about my adoption and the earliest seeds of this search.

Throughout college I knew that I wanted to find my mother. I also decided that if I pursued the search, I wanted to be “somebody” - I wanted to have a foundation, a job, and a career - I wanted to feel like I had arrived at early success.

I guess in a way I didn’t want to go back to Korea “empty handed”.

Since college I’ve visited Korea numerous times, mostly for work, but now at 30 I finally feel prepared.