Mia Mingus and Stacey Milbern are two queer disabled diasporic Korean women of color in the process moving from the South to the Bay to create home and community with each other.
This tumblr documents their journey. For more info about Mia, visit her blog at chuseok 2011
dear mia,
so much has happened these last few weeks and months. i am not even sure where to begin, but i am writing because i know we are both committed to documenting our life in letters so we can look back and remember the work we did to get where we are.
three weeks ago, we celebrated chuseok (korean harvest holiday). celebrating chuseok with you was something i dreamed of and wrote about in north carolina. neither of us know a lot about chuseok or how to celebrate it, but we researched and remixed traditions into ones that were meaningful to us. we created an alter, strung lights, and set the table with candles. we all wore clothes that we felt honored legacy. i went to the korean store and enjoyed buying songpyun dduk next to all the other people celebrating chuseok. we ate a bountiful traditional chuseok meal. it was beautiful.
holidays feel like such an important part of building home. especially korean holidays. no one challenged our right to celebrate chuseok. no one told us we were doing it wrong. i had a lot of shame that week about not being korean enough, but you held me and we found our own way of connecting to chuseok. i am so thankful. celebrating chuseok with you truly felt like all the things i had envisioned us doing here.
i am also wanting to have more conversations with you about all the differences we have experienced as mixed race/white korean person and you as an adoptee. i am being reminded that it is not enough to say i am korean because i choose to be. that an essential part of the conversation is all the white privilege i benefit from. it is a painful conversation to have, and not only because admitting mixed & white privilege is hard, but because it is complicated conversation about disaspora. but i see the way i have the choice to align with whiteness. and how white supremacy hurts you. and i want to be better. or at least to acknowledge that.
there are so many other conversations to have… how much i love it here but still miss the south.. our accountability process.. how different our lives are now than we even imagined… building home beyond the two of us.. the way we get pitted against one another and have to actively choose each other… the work of continually reimagining and redefining home for ourselves. i am excited to be writing you again :-)
love,
stacey
our chuseok picture, taken with queer chosen family [L-R: Mia, Stacey, Micah, Ryan Li, and Acca]:
