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 November 6th
dear stacey,
Today is November 6th, the day I was brought to the adoption agency to be adopted, the day the adoption agency recorded as my birthday, the day I celebrated as my birthday for 25 years. It is the day I left my birth family, never knowing if I would return. It is the day I left my first home, my first land. It is the day that a strain of longing was born inside of me for something that I do not even know how to name or explain. It has eaten away at my insides, turned me into an empty shell of myself, the loneliness a comforting friend.
My birthday, as is the case for many adoptees, is a complicated web of sticky feelings, some of which I decide to feel or not feel and some that overtake me without consent, pulling me in, down, back and under. November 6th got recorded as my birthday by an industry that profits off of the erasure of my birth family, the construction of someone with no past. My life did not begin when I was placed for adoption; I was already here. Today is not my birthday.
I hate the confusion that surrounds my birthday now. People constantly getting confused, “so which birthday do you celebrate?” “When is your real birthday?” Since finding out the truth, I would rather deny my birthday all together, no celebrations, no worries about what or how birthdays are supposed to feel to someone who does not even know how to think of her own birth. It only marks another year that I have spent separated from pieces of myself that may or may not even exist; pieces of my self that made me, created me, but don’t know me now. It only marks a deep sadness at having celebrated something that was so wrong for so long, something that wasn’t real, the way sometimes entire decades of my life have felt.
It is a part of me, but it is not a birth. It is more like a death, a loss or a closing. And it means talking about things that sit so close to my heart, things that I don’t even completely know how to hold.
Sometimes I think I don’t know what it means to feel connection to land, having been ripped from one piece of earth and shoved into another. Sometimes I think the only land I know, the only land on which I belong is the shifting tides of the ocean. The place that has always been able to hold my shifting adoptee disabled korean queer girl self. Sometimes I think that what we are doing, the bravery of finding home and attempting to create it, is something I know nothing about. Something I have no business being a part of. I have no home, but myself and even that isn’t always true. Belonging is something I know nothing about. Living on the other side of dreaming is nothing I know about, having only ever had dreams, distant blurry memories, to keep me alive.
I know I existed before November 6th, even if there is no trace, even if I can’t remember how my mother smelled or my sisters’ six inquisitive eyes gazing at me. I know I knew something about home at sometime, even if it, like everything else got re-written and stamped and filed away.
Maybe all adoptees find home in their own ways, maybe some of us never do; maybe our homes are in the leaving, in the moving, in the shifting of the wind that carried so many of us past the horizon. Maybe I belong nowhere; maybe that is how they like it—a living, breathing constant experiment.
30 years ago I left my very first home for another temporary home, a foster home, before being adopted. Last week I left the first place that ever really felt like my home for this temporary home until we find an accessible place to make our home. Maybe this is a re-birth of some sort, into a second chance at belonging and creating home, a kind of returning all on to itself. I know I knew something about home at sometime, maybe I will find it again. It was not erased, just like me.
dreaming home,
mia
