I had a good day today because I found out that my genetic test was negative for being prone to more breast cancer and ovarian cancer.  Basically, modern medicine has been able to identify two genes responsible for breast cancer which are also linked to ovarian cancer.  If there is a mutation on one of the genes, you’re fifty percent likely to get these cancers again.  Thankfully, I do not have a mutation on these genes, so I will not have to worry about this.  It was a small victory, today.

Mostly, finding out about the cancer I have was an upheaval of my life in Korea and summer plans.  I was on track to finish the last level of the Korean language program at Hongdae and now, instead, I am back in my hometown at my parents’ house, going into Boston for additional tests and preparing for the lumpectomy I will have to have.  What I have is really, really small and stage one, so I should be ok.  Unfortunately, it threw in a huge factor when I had to decide about the change of major for the MFA program at Hongdae, rushing to find out whether I’d be able to do radiation and treatment back in Seoul to be able to even start the grad program.  In the end, I ran out of time and the admissions people were not understanding at all, so I will have to go to the far away campus outside of Seoul for film and animation.

I feel very mixed about it because this means I will most likely have to move after first semester and commute an hour an a half or more just for the program.  Friends remind me that it’s only for a year, technically, since I can do the last semester from anywhere since it will just be the thesis project.  Still, by the last week of June which was the deadline for the change, I had decided it is probably best to just do illustration/photo on the Seoul campus but I found out that they didn’t want me to change in the last week.  They wanted me to have approval by the professors and department by then.  There was no way I could have done this since I spent two weeks finding out about hospitals in Seoul that could even work with the doctors at my hospital in Boston.

Part of me thinks it might be ok and it’s definitely maybe better and makes more sense for me to do something like film and animation if I am going to stay in Korea but another part of me does not want to move out of my apartment to another area in the south of Seoul and does not want to commute that far.  I really am concerned having that much of a commute will hinder me from finishing the program.  I’m not sure what I was thinking not changing sooner and feeling more confident about that.  I need to see a psychic or intuitive about it…

Being back home in the US further confuses me, as well.  Part of me just wants to apply to textile design jobs and stay in the US and give up on Korea.  Korea has not been that nice to me, honestly, and I do feel more secure in the US.  It’s tiring dealing with Koreans and their systems and the huge culture difference every day.  I wish Koreans and Korean society were more understanding and forgiving, but, alas, it is not.

I guess Korea and Koreans not being very understanding makes sense which is why adoption out of Korea exists in the first place and continues.  It’s not exactly a very forgiving, open-minded or open-hearted society.  I’m not saying the US is perfect, but I have to say after living in Korea for so long now and being back in the US, it is a lot more open-minded and forgiving in a lot of ways that I took for granted when I did live here.

There are things I love about Korea and Koreans but I have to say as a society, it’s pretty tough especially if you do not fit the norm or are a foreigner who looks Korean.  I’m sure in ten years it will be much different, but that’s rather far away.  I also don’t appreciate when Koreans do things to me as a kind of revenge against the US.  I am not the US.  I am just a person who was sent there because Korea could not take care of a child out of wedlock.  Really not fair.  Take out your shit on someone else, please.

She has also been very helpful in finding students for me and my boyfriend and I have become friends with one of her very Christian friends who we’re both afraid is following a cult.  This is definitely a different side of Korea I have never had the opportunity to peek in at and experience.  It’s definitely the start of an interesting chapter.

Upon my return to Seoul I had extreme mixed feelings about being back here.  I wondered what exactly I was doing.  Was I trying to prove something and be a Super Korean Adoptee like some of the activists and filmmakers here?  Was I really going to be able to make my relationship with my birth family better, something long-lasting that will continue even when I move back to the States?  Was this even possible?  Was I really going to make great korean adoptee artwork and video projects here in Seoul?  Aren’t there enough people already doing that?

These questions swirled around my head on the bus ride from Incheon Airport back to my “home” in Hongdae.  My boyfriend was waiting for me and I was excited about seeing him after two months away from him but it perplexed and surprised me that I hadn’t missed him more when I was back in the US and that I was a bit scared that I had changed in that time enough to make our relationship awkward, or worse, unnecessary.  But at least I had Korean classes at Ewha University to ground me and the goal of finishing the six level program as a guiding goal.

Unfortunately, I found out that Ewha did not want me to return and they had not even given me the courtesy of telling me before I had left for the summer semester even though I told them I was definitely coming back for the fall semester.  I was devastated since I have friends there, liked the teachers and they finally seemed to like me and I only had two semesters left and a scholarship through an adoptee organization here.  I met with the administration at Ewha and the teachers of the language program who gave me the run around and also told me I had been a distracting student for the students from China and Japan since I needed extra help since I was from the West.  I was told other students had complained about me in secret to our teachers and that rather than speak to me about the problem which may have come from a culture gap and my stress about passing each semester, they had decided to not let me continue studying at Ewha.  They insisted that another program for foreigners would be better for me even though I had been there for over a year and well past any level that be translated partly into English at other Korean language schools.  Sigh.  After tears and outrage I had no choice but to accept their unfair decision and leave.  My Korean tutor I had been assigned in the spring semester, a Korean student from Ewha whom I had become close with, helped me talk to the administration and teachers there but she also felt they were cold and unfair and not making any sense.  She too left in tears after I thanked her for her help.

So I had lost the scholarship and the dream of learning Korean and graduating from the language program I had worked hard in for nearly two years.  I was tired of trying to find a Korean language program at universities here in Seoul that did not discriminate against me for being a Korean adoptee, looking Korean but using foreign western thinking and having the same difficulties learning Korean that a White person would have and I was tired of being discriminated against for being female but not acting like a typical Korean women.  I did not receive the special treatment that White foreign men received from the mostly single Korean female teachers who seemed to flirt and hope for a relationship with an exotic, open-minded White man and I received no credit for learning the amount of Korean I did learn and continuing to study and repeat levels even when I failed on more than one occasion.  I realized that these programs, their teachers and their teaching methodology did not work for me and that I needed, perhaps, a tutor I felt comfortable with who would teach with a more Western teaching approach and who would be compassionate to the difficulties of learning Korean many Korean adoptees like myself struggle with.

I’m still looking for this tutor and trying to find a full-time job and readjust to my reformed goals in Korea.

Anyway, this blog will be about my life in Korea as a Korean adoptee, a writer, and artist.  I hope it will help other Korean adoptees who have thought about coming to Korea to search for birth family, Korean adoptees who have met birth family but have not yet established a relationship with them and other Korean adoptees who dream about and wonder what it would be like to live here now as an adult or even guiltily wonder what it would have been like to have grown up in Korea.

This is a new vlog I learned about that teaches all about videoblogging.  It also features artists and such.