This story hits closer to home than you'd first think. Here's a link to a series of YouTube videos that I suspect many of my readers will find very interesting and very touching.
It concerns not only an issue very emotional on it's serface but also one which, coincidentally, effects of our own.....i.e. one of our lovely salseras. I won't mention the name. It's in the video.
But I will tell you this:
This young lady is somebody I knew, through my blog, back in the US. She's a very nice person, a Korean-American and......a very cool salsa dancer and casinera. She came over here to Korea several months ago for multiple reasons, probably, but one of them was very unique.
This young lady was adopted, from Korea, by American parents in 1966. As it turned out, the couple that adopted her had some functional issues and her childhood life, although perhaps in some ways better than what she might have experienced in Korea at that time, wasn't the happiest.
Life goes on and she eventually left home and got married. That didn't last too long but she carried on with her life. And, somewhere, got into salsa. That was a good thing of course.
She came over here with, in addition to the work opportunity itself, the important goal of finding her roots. What I didn't know before seeing these videos was all the issues involved with adoption of Korean kids by foreign families.
It's an issue that in one sense is very complex but in another sense is simple. All that is in the videos. I watched'em all.
I was interested not just because this young lady is a personal friend of mine but also because I had a somewhat similar issue in my family. I only discovered sometime in the 90's that the guy, Jake, who I thought was my biological grandfater (on my mother's side) wasn't actually....that person.
My mother got kinda crazy in her later years and died in 06 after spending a couple years in an assisted living center in Houston (where we both lived at the time). The primary reason she died had to do with her smoking habit of many years although she never would admit it. She always blamed it on doctors.
Point is, in a manner of speaking, she never really was a happy person throughout much of her life. A big part of that reason was that my grandmother, Ruby, never told her who her real father was other than saying that he was a prominent politician.
For some reason(s), partly perhaps fabricated and partly based on what my grandmother told her, my mom always thought she was related to the Daniels family of Texas politics. And she spent a lot of time writing this and that person and this and that organization or public agency trying to track down that mysterious identity.
In effect, she sorta thought she was some long lost heir and princess of a prominent family who, if recognized, would suddenly have the respect and love that she never otherwise found (my mom was married several times after my real dad died in a Army aviation accident when I was one year old).
So.......in a sense, my mom also had a lifelong issue with a critical part of her identity.....i.e. who her father really was. She never forgave my grandmom for not telling her. Supposedly the reason my grandmom wouldn't tell her was because back in those years, in North Texas, being illegitimate just wasn't something that was as accepted as it is today.
Other than that aspect of my grandmom's life, she and Jake were a model couple. But I won't go into that here. The point is that that's why I sorta can understand why a similar issue is so important to the person I'm speaking about in this post.
Anyway........the videos are very interesting and the story isn't over yet. It's an issue that still needs to be put to rest in Korea and it sounds like my friend still might someday discover the answers she's looking for. I certainly hope so.
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