Ebb and Flow

Formation in Place, Part 6: A series on the spiritual work of connecting with our landscapes and ancestral roots. Read the other post in this series:

Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich on Unsplash

Read the other posts in this series:

• Part 1: Meaning in the Mud

• Part 2: The Story Before the Story

• Part 3: Societal Disconnect

• Part 4: Damaged Relationships

• Part 5: Slippery Spirituality

Ebb and Flow

The Korean War ended eight years before my mother was born—a time of political instability marked by a series of military coups and authoritarian regimes. Born in 1961, my mother was told that she was found in a ditch; her parents either abandoned her or died—we don’t really know. Could the ditch in my family history be located in the region with the Getbol tidal flats—images of which now appeared on my television show as I watched the Netflix show Korea No. 1?

I have only one clue of where in Korea my ancestors may originate. It’s been 10 years since I took an Ancestry.com DNA test. The closest Korean relative I’ve identified on the website is himself an adoptee—a cousin several steps removed. Likely, we share a first or second great-grandparent.

While at first I was surprised, I’ve since realized that this is fairly probable for Korean Americans—scholar Elena Kim estimates that about 1 in 10 Korean Americans are adoptees.

These days I view origin accounts from adoption agencies with suspicion. I don’t want to rule out the possibility that even a grandparent was alive when I was born in the 1980s. With no welfare system, political leaders supported wide-spread adoption to the West, helped by stigmas around single motherhood. The importance of “proper” family lines influenced Korean social workers to insert fake names and back stories into adoption paperwork.

A couple in southern Missouri adopted my mother when she was 3. I imagine she lived for a while in a process of forgetting her old life and replacing it with something new, something American. Maybe that process was still underway by the time I was born, and she did not want to invite me into her new life? She handed me over to adoption—her heirloom to me—perhaps to forestall her own motherhood.

As an infant I was placed with white parents in North Dakota, a flat landlocked place with expansive night skies, a vast distance from the images that scrolled across the television screen.

From the helicopter, the camera pans over a sandbar made of sand, pebbles, and seashells piled up during a typhoon. My eye travels down the narrow spit of land until it comes to a tuft of green plant life punctuating the end of the line. Ko, their guide, explains, that this is a depositional landform, formed by waves actively settling particles on the seafloor.

Surrounded by a vast muddy seafloor crisscrossed by tidal channels with no certain footholds, it looks like a road back toward solid ground. Perhaps there are still pathways back to a sense of place and connection to a homeland. Perhaps, I can find yet existing in-roads.

I remember this is the reason back in 2015 I reached out through Ancestry.com to my distant cousin, no matter how far removed. Not yet an adult, his adoptive mother answered my messages to his profile on his behalf, trying to help. Through her, I learn he was born in Mokpo on the southwestern coast of Korea in the early 2000s, and together, his adoptive family has successfully found his grandmother. Mokpo is a port city firmly attached to the mainland leading into the Sinan tidal flat, the largest of the four tidal areas included in Getbol.

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