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6 Seoul Searching Rebecca J. Kinney Usually the metal bars lining the ceilings of a commuter train exhaust me. Whether in San Francisco or in Paris, I always ‹nd my arm stretched out like a human Gumby when faced with the uncomfortable reality of a full train. In Korea, however, the subway trains are better suited to ‹t my compact build. My arm reaches easily above to secure myself against the jarring of the train. As I ride the subway around Seoul I ‹nd myself an “invisible foreigner” until I open my mouth. People turn to see the “American,” speaking English with a bit of Detroit twang. No “American” is detected, all they see is me. I traveled halfway around the world and I am still faced with a second round of questions after I tell people I am American. “But aren’t you Korean?” “What are you?” How is that for irony? The dominant way that people think about identity is constrictive but is still able to transcend borders, moving ›uidly over place and time. I struggle to claim and create a space representative of my multiple identities, but my international status only seems to complicate things. I began my life, transnational garbage—thrown out, abandoned. Picked up thousands of miles away and loved. I am one of thousands of Korean children who were adopted by United States citizens. This is where my traditional narrative begins, six months old and on a ›ight from Seoul bound for Detroit to a family already comprised of a mom and dad, both descendants of poor white sharecroppers, and a three-year-old sister who had been adopted from Korea three years earlier. However, I have begun this piece on “Asian American identity” where I am right now, at a PC bang in Seoul.1 So here I am in this smoke-‹lled room surrounded by the click-clacking of people playing Star Craft as others chat online with friends all over the world. And I ask myself, What am I doing here? Partly, I am here based on me as a commodity, a Korean American college graduate who speaks English with an “American accent” and “can offer insight to my students about what it means to be Korean American.” If my boss only knew that there is not a singular de‹nition of “Korean American.” More important, the economic pull and my own personal curiosity about this foreign biological motherland landed me on a ›ight to Seoul, twenty-one years and twenty-one days after taking the same ›ight, only with opposite points of embarkation and destination. It is almost like my own personal coming-of-age narrative, as if suddenly I were a heroine in one of the novels I had to read in my freshman-year English class. This heroine is on a search for answers. I’m seeking an alternative way to think about identity and give voice to my own personal story. I have spent a lot of time looking for the archetypal version of my immigration story. But for all my searching, I have not found one. Growing up in a post–World War II suburb created from the ‹rst waves of white ›ight, I was vaguely aware of my racial “otherness” (I recall one second-generation Chinese American girl and another Korean adoptee in my high school of about one thousand students), but more often than not it was not talked about. I did not know how to de‹ne myself; there were not any representations of Asians readily available to me. This meant that usually I tried to blend into my vanilla suburb as best I could. When friends told me that they thought of me as white, or as “the same as them,” I recall feelings of discomfort, although at the time, I did not know how to articulate what I was feeling. My physical features set me apart, but in most ways my family was typical of suburban Detroit—my grandparents came from the South to work in Detroit’s auto factories, and my family was more likely to eat meatloaf than bulgogi. It was clear that the difference between my family and those of my friends was a result of my physical difference. When I was very young one of my favorite bedtime books was Why Was I Adopted? My parents would explain to me why I looked different from them and help me understand this difference (one thing they would tell...

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