I hate moving around. And yet, I constantly find myself doing it. My skin is itchy and I have a rash on my back. I feel like I’m allergic to the US. I feel like no matter where I go, I will always end up telling myself that there is nowhere in the world that I belong. But isn’t that such a privilege? To have the time to worry about this? It’s not like I’m rich, but I also don’t have to work 3 or 4 jobs to eat or keep a roof over my head. I struggle with feeling like my emotions are justified.

My thesis for English is on international/interracial adoption and continuing to do research on it has just made me more sensitive, I suppose. I am reading about so many other adoptees and their struggles and their lives and their feelings of racial melancholia. Here are a few articles I really found compelling. The first is more of a narrative approach from a Chinese American adoptee, connecting the author’s own experiences to how she processed Celeste Ng’s novel. The second is by a Korean American adoptee who analyzes three different books on interracial adoption in the US.

I looked up more on the second author and he has a very interesting blog as well. I’ll try to follow him more. He has gone to Ivy Leagues in the US as a first-generation college student, taught abroad in Korea on a Fulbright scholarship, taught himself Korean, and is now hoping to be an English professor. I don’t desire to be a professor, but it makes me feel comforted to know that other adoptees also have found a way to express themselves through literature or reading or writing.

In this transient state of being, what can we grasp onto to keep us motivated? Community is what reading comes down to. The connection between the author and the reader, the reader with other readers, the world with the ideas that books present… There are so many intangible ways that books are able to shape our lives, but the ideas that they foster are seen in very real policy, practice, and actions. It’s rather mind-boggling.

I guess the point of all of this is to say that there will never be a perfect place that I fit in. And the way that I choose to identify or the way that others choose to identify me will always impact that. Literature has been a way to help me understand that in some ways. The loneliness of feeling alone is eased by the words of someone, somewhere, in some distant (or not-so-distant) time. So thanks for being part of my community.